


Iniquitous

by Deuslock



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Death of a Parent, Gen, Gothic imagery, Imaginary Sherlock, ImaginaryFriendSherlock, Is any of this real?, Kidlock, M/M, Manipulation, Possessive Behavior, Possessive Sherlock, Teenlock, monsterlock, neglectful parent, or not?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-13
Updated: 2017-04-13
Packaged: 2018-10-18 14:09:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10618548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deuslock/pseuds/Deuslock
Summary: "Monsters don't exist, John, and if they did, I wouldn't be one of them."





	

**Author's Note:**

> This was my story that was recently featured in TWISTED: A Dark AU Fanbook, which was illustrated by the amazing [meetingyourmaker](http://www.meetingyourmaker.tumblr.com).
> 
> We're out of print, but you can buy a PDF, (complete with illustrations for this story!) [here!](https://gumroad.com/l/xTqBc)
> 
> Keep an eye out for the Easter Egg in the story! ;)

It begins when John is six years old and standing over a casket.

  
Granddad tells him that death is just another part of life, and what that meant was that even though one great adventure had ended, another was just beginning.  
  
John listens closely because grandad tells him to.  
  
He speaks to him in a quiet, hushed voice as he holds his hand too tight while his other hand squeezes Harry’s shoulder, keeping her small, trembling body curled into his side. She hiccups and chokes on a sob that’s muffled by his thick wool coat, and he leans down to kiss the top of her head in response.  
  
John doesn’t know what all that is supposed to mean, because he doesn’t know how great of an adventure that daddy is going to have in a box in the ground.  
  
He looks down, watches as the bright red roses fall on top of a gleaming black surface while an old man is saying things in a slow, sad voice. John shifts from one foot to the other and pulls at his tie, which is uncomfortably tight, thinking that if it were any tighter, he might just stop being able to breathe, and then there would have to be _two_ of these things.

  
But the drop down to the giant hole in the ground is far and a bit scary, so John stops fiddling with the tie and takes a small step back.

  


 

Later, when people he doesn’t know hug him and kiss him, eyes wet and cheeks red, telling him how loved he is and how proud daddy would be at how brave he was being, granddad pulls him aside. He tells him that he’s the man of the house now, and that it’s his job to keep mummy safe and happy.    
  
“Like a Knight,” he says gruffly, patting his shoulder, and John wonders with quite a bit of worry if this means he would have to start wearing suits of armor and learn to ride a horse. He likes the armor part okay, but he doesn’t like horses so much because he’s afraid he might fall off of it and get stomped on, and then there would _really_ be two of these things.  
  
But before he can ask, grandad is being called away, leaving John to stand by himself.  
  
He turns around quickly to search for mummy to ask her this very important question instead, because she _always_ knows the answers to these things, but she’s nowhere to be seen, and he has to push his way through the sea of black and chorus of sniffles until he finds her.  
  
He sees her a little ways off, at the far end of the room. She’s staring out a window with a blank expression on her face, hands hanging loosely by her sides and a mouth that’s gone all slack. John doesn’t know what she’s looking at, but he thinks she must be looking at _something_ , because she doesn’t look at anyone when they walk by or respond when anyone says her name.  
  
John waits, but she doesn’t move. She barely even blinks.  
  
He has the sudden urge to run to her. Wants to bury his face into her stomach and hold on tight until she smoothes a hand through his hair like she always does. She’ll look down at him and smile that nice, warm smile. She’ll say, _hello, my darling_ and wiggle his nose. She’ll rub her thumb across the bandage on his head. She’ll hold him tight and tell him that she loves him, very, very much. That nothing will change. That everything will be just fine.  
  
He keeps waiting for it to happen, because everyone else has done it already, but he’s still waiting for her turn.  
  
In the end, she doesn’t turn around to look at him. She doesn’t even notice him standing there, but suddenly, granddad is back and he’s taking his hand.  
  
“Let’s leave mummy alone right now,” he says quietly.  
  
He sits John down at a table that’s covered in tiny cucumber sandwiches, which John eats while envisioning himself a giant. He sits alone and stares out into the crowd of people and chews slowly, and eventually he forgets all about the qualifications of being a knight.  
  
At night, when they’re back at home and John has changed out of his uncomfortable tie and Harry has thrown her dress down the steps because _daddy never made me wear these things_ , he lays in bed with the covers drawn up to his chin, and thinks. Mostly about daddy, even though he feels an ache and a confusion deep in his chest at the thought.  
  
He still has trouble understanding what any of it means.  
  
Granddad told him that the _real_ daddy, the one that ate eggs on toast for breakfast and fixed broken cars in the garage, was up in Heaven. The one that John saw in the box today was just a body, now, and nothing more, and it makes John’s head hurt trying to make sense of it.

 

That’s what happens when someone dies, grandad had said. They leave their body and fly _up, up, up_ , all the way up to Heaven, to join a big party in the sky. And it doesn’t hurt, and they always, always watch over their family.  
  
“Like Lady?” John had asked, as grandad wiped away the tears on his face.  
  
Harry's cat Lady died last year, he remembers, and they buried her under the tire swing in the back yard, just like Harry had wanted. John didn’t understand it, and he still doesn’t sometimes, because he doesn’t _really_ know what a soul is, and he thinks that maybe Lady will get scared down there all alone in the dark. Daddy had said not to worry about that. He said that she had _decomposed._  
  
When John asked what that meant, he paused, tapped at his chin with the wrench he was holding, then said, “it means she’s falling apart.”  
  
Sometimes when John sits on the tire, watching the tips of his trainers scrape the dirt, he imagines her clawing her way back up through the surface, chunks of fur falling off her skeleton and eyeballs popping out, crawling right into his lap and making the funny buzzing sound she always made when she sat in someone’s lap.  
  
He knows better than to think that she actually will, because daddy also said that when something dies, it’s gone forever and ever, but sometimes, before running back to the house, he stands very still and waits, staring at the ground beneath his feet.  
  
Just in case.  
  
John wonders if somewhere up in the sky, Lady is sitting on daddy’s lap and making the funny buzzing sound, and daddy is drinking something from a bottle and shouting down at John like he would sometimes do to the telly.. John _hopes_ he’s drinking something from a bottle. He worries that there won’t be snacks up at the party.  
  
It’s easy for John to picture, because daddy always looked the same. He would have on his thick black glasses, and he’d be wearing his brown jacket with the patches, the one that he wore everywhere, even though mummy had always said it was _ratty_ looking, whatever that meant; John didn’t think it looked like it was made of rats at all.  
  
He thinks of his greying hair and the way he would wrap John up in his arms whenever he had a bad dream, and the way he would tap his fingers on the steering wheel when they drove, singing loudly while mummy and Harry covered their ears, even though they were always laughing. John laughed, too.

  
The sound of something shattering outside of his room makes him startle, and the image starts to blur around the edges, cracking like glass, until eventually it’s a smear of color across his eyes.  
  
He hears mummy crying through the cracks in the wall. He hears her screaming into a pillow, a shrill and agonized sound, and he places his hands over his ears and buries his face into his own.  
  
He closes his eyes and tries not to feel like he’s decomposing.

 

***

 

John is standing in front of a moving truck where the last of their furniture is being hauled into the back. He watches as the big men with their big arms pack away their belongings one box at a time. Harry is yelling from somewhere that she can’t find her cassette player and _where is it? Johnny, if you took it again I’m going to tell mummy and you’re going to get into trouble!_ _  
_ _  
_ She’s banging about back inside the house, stomping around on the stairs that echo loudly in their newly-empty home, where all that’s left are scattered boxes, sheets and a whole lot of dust that John drew a picture of a dog with his finger.  
  
He doesn’t know where they’re moving, even though he’s asked mummy at least five times, and each time she tells him, he repeats the name of the town to keep it in his head, but he always forgets as soon as he thinks of something else.

 

He only remembers that each time, she says, _far_ .  
  
John worries about ‘far’ because once when they all went on holiday, John had left his favorite toy on the beach after a long day of playing, but by the time he remembered it, they were already in the car, packed up, and driving home. Daddy had said it was _too far_ to go back now.  


“Sorry, buddy,” he’d said, looking at John’s tear-streaked face from the rearview mirror. “You’ve got more at home.”  
  
John worries he’s left something here. He sees all the boxes that are labeled with his name and thinks there’s _no way_ all of his toys could have fit into just three boxes. He thinks of Archie, his stuffed bear that he sleeps with every night, the one he’s had since forever and ever, and he suddenly isn’t certain that he remembers packing him away because he had kicked and fussed that he _didn’t_ _want to put him in a box, mummy, he can’t breath in there!_  
  
He turns and races inside, running up the steps that goes on and on, spiralling up and up, turning left to his room, where his blue walls are bare and all that’s left is the spring that held his bed. He checks the closet and behind the door, then checks them again just in case, and when he’s satisfied that he definitely didn’t leave anything, he feels it's safe enough to go back downstairs.  
  
And then he hears the muffled cry coming from the next room over.  
  
The cry is a strangled sort of sound, short and fast but loud enough to get his attention. He stops in his tracks and turns towards the half-open door, and after taking a few steps towards it  and pushing on it with the tips of his fingers to peek inside, he sees mummy.  
  
And she’s sitting on the edge of a spring bed, holding a jacket to her chest, with her face buried right inside of it.  
  
It’s brown with patches around the shoulders and elbows and John thinks, _ratty_.

 

“This was his home,” he hears her whisper. _“This was our home.”_  
  
“Mummy?” he asks quietly, taking a single step inside. “Mummy, is it time to go?”  
  
Slowly, her head lifts and she looks directly at him. Her eyes are so red and the space beneath them so dark, expression so strangely _cold_ that John can feel little bumps in his skin starting to rise and a prickling feeling forming on the back of his neck.

 

Because mummy’s don’t look like that.  
  
And he feels suddenly like the very large, very empty room is getting smaller, with only mummy’s cold, hard stare filling it up. He wants to take a step back, but the shock of her sudden glare freezes him, and he can do little else but look back at her, fighting off the rush of tears that threatens to come.  
  
A long silence stretches on. And on.  
  
And then, just like that, the moment passes.

  
She lets out a little sob and buries her face back into the jacket.  
  
A witch's spell broken, she cries and cries until John no longer remembers why he came inside at all.

 

***  


The move is quick. Within the week, they’re settled into a new home, and John is sitting on his bed, which is the same one he had at the first house, only this one is tucked right against the corner of the room by the window. The walls are white and blank because John’s posters haven’t been put up yet. They’ve been sitting in a box in the corner for a few days, and everytime he asks mummy if they can put them up, she tells him, “not now, John.”  
  
When he asks if he can build his train set to make it go all around his bed, she says, “I’m busy, John”, even when she’s just sitting on the couch staring at the telly, which sometimes isn’t even on.  
  
John asked her one day if she was making up her own story, because John likes to do that sometimes too, and it was the first time in days he saw the corner of her mouth lift in some semblance of a smile.  
  
John thinks it must be really good, because she stays exactly where she is.  
  
In the meantime, his room stays blank and his toys remain in his boxes. He draws pictures instead, but they never look as good when he tries to tape them up to his walls.  
  
There’s no carpet in his room, unlike his last, and the floor is cold against his feet whenever he gets out bed in the mornings, which he always peers over the edge before he does.  
  
This house is new, after all. He hasn’t made sure there are no monsters under the bed yet.

 

***

 

Mummy isn’t home much anymore.  
  
Instead, every day, Aunt Sophia is there, and John learns that being closer to her is the reason they moved to this new house, which is huge and has a funny smell and the lights never seem to get bright enough.  
  
Aunt Sophia has blond hair, like her sister, but her eyes are dark and her red lipstick is bright. She makes them say grace at dinner and John can never remember all the words, so he watches Harry closely and tries to move his mouth the same way that she would, so that it looks like he’s doing it too. He always remembers to say, _amen,_ though, because that’s the most important part, so whenever he gets to it, he says it extra, extra loud.  
  
“Times are hard,” Aunt Sophia tells them over dinner on the third night of mummy being away. “Your mother is taking extra shifts at the hospital. But that’s alright, isn't it? You _love_ spending time with your auntie.”

 

It’s not a question.  
  
She’s sitting at the head of the table, in the spot daddy should be sitting at. She pokes at her chicken with her fork, pushing it into the juices before taking a quick bite, then goes back for another, even though she tells Harry and John they can’t eat until they thank the Lord.  


“It’s a sin,” she says.  
  
Her fork and knife scrape against the plate, screeching and piercing louder and louder each time she does so, and it’s all John can do not to press his palms as hard as he can over his ears when he listens to the blade dragging along red, ceramic plates.  
  
“I thanked Him already,” she says.  
  
John’s eyes are fixed on the way the white meat is pushed and prodded and stabbed at with little blades. She’s saying something else, but he can’t hear her. The screeching on the plate is too loud, too harsh.  
  
It makes him think of screeching tires on wet pavement, and it makes his heart race.

 

Slowly, his hands begin to move up to his ears.

  
“John.”  
  
The screeching stops.

 

John looks up at her and Aunt Sophia is smiling a red, painted-on smile.  
  
“John, would you like to say grace?”

 

***

 

John has never had to ask someone to be his friend before.

 

Friends were always just there, for as long as he could remember. There was Reggie down the street who liked to play with toy cars, and then there was Charlie from school who always traded lunches with John because he had the biscuits and John _never_ got biscuits at home. John gave him his applesauce and it was a fair trade.  
  
Here, in this new town, John doesn’t know the boy that lives down the street. He doesn’t even know if there _is_ a boy that lives down the street because he’s never seen another boy or another girl at all. Everywhere aunt Sophia takes him and Harry, people look old and wrinkly and sad. The woman that lives next door stares out her window and watches when John and Harry get into the car to go to school every day, and when John tries to wave at her and be polite like mummy had always taught him to be, her lips tighten and she closes the curtains.  
  
Mummy is too busy to take him to the park, and Aunt Sophia, when watching Harry and John during the day, likes to sit them in front of the telly while she talks on the phone in a loud voice. Sometimes Harry will play with him, but it’s only after he _begs_ , and it doesn’t take long for her to grow bored before she’s sighing and wandering off to her room to do something else.  
  
“What are you going to play?” he asks, and she will roll her eyes and say something like, “I’m going to listen to my _music,”_ like it were obvious.  
  
And John will say, “Can I listen too?”  
  
But by the time he gets up to follow her, she’s usually got her bedroom door closed in his face. Aunt Sophia is always his last choice, but it’s never works either.

  
“Entertain yourself, John,” she says, holding the phone’s receiver into her shoulder. “Surely you can think of something.”  
  
And then she goes back to her phone call and John will go sit back down and stare at the telly.

 

***

 

The first day of his new school, John is told to stand in front of his class and introduce himself, and he feels his stomach turning in knots when he does so. He isn’t used to not knowing anybody, and his new teacher doesn’t smile like the way his old one used to, but purses her lips in a line and waits for him impatiently. Her hands, with their pointy nails, are folded in front of her grey dress, like claws being carefully hidden.  
  
“Hullo,” he says, summoning every bit of courage he can and not stutter out something that sounds too funny. “I’m John Watson and I live on… er...” he trails off, trying to remember his street name. He can’t think of it, can _never_ remember the name, and his heart starts to race with worry, because his new classmates are staring at him blankly. He quickly looks up to his new teacher for guidance, for her to tell him where he lives, but she only says in a slow, bored voice, “class?”

  
Blessedly, there is a chorus of, _hello, John_ from the room. John smiles and feels a little bit better, but just as quickly as their collected voices die out, Ms. Morde is putting her sharp, pointed nails on his shoulder and telling him to go sit down.  
  
He sits in the back of the class, right by the corner, because it’s the only open spot. The desks are bolted to the floors, and this one seems further away from everyone else, and John has to lean forward in his chair to see the blackboard, where Ms. Morde is starting their grammar lesson.

 

***

 

“Mummy,” John asks one Saturday morning, looking up from the telly whenever the episode of Scooby Doo goes to commercial break. “Mummy, can we go to the park?”  
  
She’s sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hand. Her eyes are closed against her palm and a cup of something long-gone cold rests against her pinky finger. She’s so still and silent that John feels a familiar prickling in the back of his neck.  
  
“Mummy, can we go outside?” John repeats, louder, and her face turns further away from him.  
  
_“Mummy?”_

 

***

 

At night, when everyone else is asleep, is when John hears her downstairs. Like the owls and crickets outside, nighttime is the only time when he hears her make any sort of noise at all.  
  
Sometimes he stays up, fighting off sleep until he hears the door downstairs opening up and the sound of a light switch turning on. He waits, counting on the sound of her footsteps, slow and shuffled, making their way up the stairs.  
  
Sometimes he hears her heating something up in the microwave; something Aunt Sophia has cooked up that night, and John can’t hear if she does or not, but he wonders if she says grace too.  
  
And then, once up in her room, once her door is shut, John hears the first muffled cry.

 

And he breaths out a little sigh, because mummy crying, making sounds, fills him up with relief.

  


***

 

It feels colder and darker in this corner of the classroom, like the lights don’t quite reach all the way where he sits, and he begins to wonder if he can even be seen at all in this shadowed, tiny spot. It’s been weeks, and John has never felt more forgotten.  
  
He’s never called on by Ms. Morde to read from their book, and he never seems to be called on when he raises his hand to come to the front to complete a maths problem on the board, even though he practices every night so that he can show everyone how good he is at subtracting.  
  
It’s like the corner he sits in has swallowed him up.  
  
It’s only when the girl with the yellow pigtails in the last row turns and looks at him midway through a reading lesson one day that he knows he’s not actually invisible at all, even when he sits alone at lunchtime, watching the other kids walk right by him without even looking his way. He catches her eye and immediately perks up. He smiles a little smile and lifts his hand in a wave, but she gives him the sort of stare that makes him stop immediately and lower his hand. And then she turns right back around again, and John doesn’t know why, but he suddenly feels like he might start to cry.  
  
And he sits like this, every day.

 

***

 

“My dad said that your dad didn’t come to conferences because he’s dead. Is he really?”  
  
John looks up from his handful of fruit snacks, and standing in front of him is Sally, a girl John recognizes from the front row, who always has her hand up first when Ms. Morde asks the class a question.  
  
She’s staring at him with an expectant expression, her dark brown eyes hard and demanding for an answer. John doesn’t know _how_ her daddy knows this about _his_ daddy, but instead of answering her, John holds out his packet of fruit snacks and says, “want one?”

 

He offers her a little smile. “I like your hair.”  
  
Sally blinks at him, rapidly, and John holds the snacks out further. “I like the blue ones best.”  
  
And then the girl named Sally does something quite unexpected.  
  
She pushes his hand away roughly and says, “I have my _own_ , thanks” before she’s turning on her heel and walking away with her nose in the air. She joins a boy that’s standing not too far off, who had been watching the interaction, and together they laugh before they’re running away.  
  
John watches them go as he lowers his hand, and his insides feels like he’s being scooped out, little by little.

 

***  


By the third week, John doesn’t make any friends, so he makes his own.  
  
He makes up Gladstone after he sees a puppy in the window of a pet store. He was white with brown spots and he was chasing his tail, and John laughed and watched him through the glass before aunt Sophia was pulling him away.  
  
John always wanted a puppy of his own, but was always told no, that they’re too much work. Daddy was the one who always said _maybe_ .  
  
But since he can’t have a real one, he pretends he has _this_ one.  
  
He gets the name from a street corner they pass, and that’s all it really takes.

 

He pretends Gladstone is sitting at the table with them while they eat, right beside him, while aunt Sophia’s fork scrapes harshly on her plate and clicking her tongue like a great big bird at them. He tunes her out and stares at the spot, watching as Gladstone’s tongue rolls out of his mouth, clearly wanting some of the beef they’re eating, and John pretends to tell him it’s not very good, anyway and he wouldn’t like it.  
  
With every screech and scrape and cut, John’s eyes glaze over and he imagines more.  
  
Brown eyes. Floppy ears. He licks John’s hand and he pretends to pat him on the head.

 

He thinks about Gladstone chasing him in the backyard, in the sun. On his way to school, he pretends Gladstone is walking next to him, like his own personal Scooby Doo, and when something happens, like when he gets on the bus or passes by a person on the street, he pretends that everyone else can see him too, and John imagines their reactions to the cool duo.  
  
For a while, it’s just the two of them against the rest of the whole, wide world.  
  
He draws a picture of him while he’s coloring in the grass with a yellow crayon because he doesn’t have green, and it’s good enough, for a while.

 

***

 

But sometimes it’s not enough, because dogs don’t _really_ talk, and even though he pretends that he does sometimes, like say, _good morning, John, what are we going to do today?_ It’s not quite the same.

 

***  


 

And then one day while riding the tube home from school, John sees something absolutely incredible.

 

The train came to a stop at Paddington Station. John’s backpack was sat in his lap and he fidgeted with the straps, staring out at the platform. Ten stops to go. He always counts down so he doesn’t forget.

 

And that’s what he saw him.  
  
He was John’s age, maybe a little younger, with a mop of dark hair that fell in his eyes and a tie around his neck that was done up perfectly. He was sitting on the bench next to an older boy who was reading a book, and he had a distant, far-away expression that said he was bored and maybe a little angry at something.

And it feels like John is looking at himself.  
  
The tube stops for at least thirty seconds, but to John, it feels like it’s stalling at the station for hours.  
  
And he can’t stop staring at the boy.  
  
He watches him through the glass because he has nothing else to look at and because the boy is fascinating to John in a way he doesn’t understand. He’s sitting perfectly still, almost _unnaturally_ still, like a statue, and he thinks the boy looks just as John feels; surrounded by people, but more like a spot of paint that’s dropped on a white floor.  
  
John wants to know him. He wants to know his name, wants to know if hears the screeching in his head, too. He wants to know if somewhere deep inside, he feels lonely and empty.  
  
Whatever empty means.  
  
He wants to put his hand on the glass, tap on it with his knuckles to get the boy’s attention, but as soon as he does so, the tube’s doors are closing and the car lurches forward slightly, signalling the sudden, slow crawl forward.  
  
John feels desperate as he leans his head against the glass, following the boy with his eyes, and he’s almost out of sight completely, but at the very last moment, the boy turns and looks directly at him.  
  
He doesn’t follow the windows until he sees John, but looks directly at him as if he knew John were looking the whole time and only chose that moment to silently say, _I see you._

 

Their eyes meet for less than a second, but long enough for John to catch a strange brightness to them, before he disappears from sight completely.  
  
The rest of the way home, John feels the thing in his chest beating rapidly, and he doesn’t know how to explain it, but it’s one of the best feelings he’s ever had.

 

***  


After that, it becomes easy.  
  
After that, he doesn’t have to feel alone anymore.

  
It’s easy to make believe that he’s really there. The boy from the tube had been so _striking,_ so _interesting,_ that even hours later, John can still picture his messy brown hair and his bright, bright eyes.

 

John has never had a make-believe friend before, but so far, it’s better than any friend he’s ever had _ever_ .  
  
Now, when he eats lunch at school, he doesn’t sit alone, because the boy from the train sits across from him, with his done-up tie and his bored eyes, but they always laugh together when John pretends that he says something like, _the girl with the pigtails still wets the bed_ , or, _that boy’s mummy still has to lace up his trainers for him because he can’t do it by himself._ _  
_  
And John giggles and he pretends the boy looks pleased with himself, and then suddenly the bell will ring, signalling it’s time to go back to class, and John imagines the boy getting up out of his chair and saying, _okay, John, it’s time to go back._  
  
If people stare at him when he says _okay, let’s go!_ to nobody in particular, he doesn’t notice.

 

***

 

He doesn’t give him a name, not like he did Gladstone. He doesn’t look like anyone that John has ever seen before, and names like ‘Henry’ and ‘Jack’ just don’t seem to fit his wild, dark hair and sharp, bright eyes that reminds him of the tops of mountains, or the way John pretends he says his name.  
  
It doesn’t change anything at all.

 

***

 

It goes on for a long time. Sometimes at dinner, when Aunt Sophia is talking between bites of food, John will stare at the empty-space at the diner table where mummy sits if she’s home, and he imagines the boy from the tube sitting there, picking at his food. John will grin, because he pretends that he scoops all of his peas into a napkin and squashes them before feeding them to Gladstone, who runs little circles around his chair.  
  
And sometimes Aunt Sophia will say, “what’s so funny, John?” and John will blink, as if he’d been in a daze.

 

More often than not, he doesn’t hear what she’s said.

 

***

 

“How come that boy is always talking to himself?”

 

“He’s _so weird.”_

 

“My mummy says I have to invite everyone to my birthday, but I don’t want to ask him.”  


“How come he always looks like he’s being hypn-hypnotized?”

 

“New kids are always weird.”

 

“Freaky.”

 

***

 

 _Scratch, scratch, scratch_ John hears at night, from somewhere under the bed.

 

_Scratch, scratch, scratch._

 

***

 

By the fifth week of school, he’s stopped raising his hand altogether. He keeps his head down in his book and writes his lessons on his paper. He’s never called on. Nobody sits with him at lunch and at recess, he eats his snacks alone by the fence. He gets all of them, because his new friend from the train doesn’t like the blues one.

 

And then he goes back to class and the day goes on and on, and the only time he thinks he hears his name, from anyone, it’s like a whisper in his ear.  
  
And it sounds so nice and so strange and clear that John always turns to look behind him, but the only thing there is the bookshelf where all the spare books are kept, in the dark, dark corner.

 

***

 

And John is happy.

 

***

 

Sometimes John wakes up in the middle of the night gasping for air.  
  
It’s always the same. A ringing in his ears and the sound of wheels on slick pavement, rushing, screeching, _squealing_ , and the sensation of falling sideways. But before any sound of impact, John is flailing, shooting upwards in his bed and clutching a hand into the front of his pyjamas, chest heaving and heart racing a million, _billion_ miles an hour, as though he’s been running and running forever.  


Most nights, he’s able to lay back down and counts backwards from one-hundred until sleep pulls him back under, but other nights, he stays awake, willing himself not to go to mummy’s room and crawl into bed with her. Tells himself to ignore the strange sound of scratching from beneath his bed and the way he always feels like he’s being watched.

  
And nights like tonight, his body is thrown sideways by his own tossing and turning, and he falls too far, landing with a hard _thud_ on the cold, wooden floor of his room. The impact makes him cry out, but he doesn’t sit up straight away. Instead, he rolls to his side and curls himself into a ball, holding the side of his head. His heart is racing again and he’s feeling things, remembering things he doesn’t understand, but he knows his stomach is hurting and tears are leaking from the corners of his eyes, dripping onto the floor so loudly that he’s sure they’re going to wake up mummy.  
  
And for the first time in a long time, pretending anyone is there with him doesn’t help.  
  
He squeezes his eyes shut, as if doing so will push out every last tear he can muster, and once he’s certain that no more are going to come, he slowly opens them into the darkness.  
  
To see another pair of eyes looking at him.  
  
Bright eyes. Catlike eyes, glowing at him from beneath his bed, and John gasps, scrambling up to a sitting position.  
  
The eyes blink.  
  
A chill goes up his spine and the hair on the back of his neck raises. He’s frozen to the ground, as if an invisible, icy hand were reaching up from beneath the floorboards and holding him in place.  
  
Because one thing is for certain.  
  
There’s a monster under his bed.  
  
Daddy once told him all about monsters that lived there and everything he should do to keep them away, but in all those times, John is on top of the bed, _never_ on the floor. He’s safe from them up there, but down here on the cold ground, he’s exposed and ready to be grabbed up, and John wants to scramble back up top, but he’s so scared that he can’t move, can barely even blink.  
  
But the eyes under the bed blink for him and John is sure he’s seen them somewhere before, but before he can think too much about where, there is a hand reaching out towards him from the shadows.  
  
The hand is small, no bigger than his own, but the fingers are long and thin and they’re curling into the wooden floor, making a harsh _scratching_ sound as the figure pulls itself out, little by little. A hand, an arm, a head.  
  
John thinks it’s a dream, that it _must_ be a dream and that he’s still asleep, but even after he closes his eyes tight and whispers _you’re not here, you’re not here_ , he feels something on his face that makes his eyes snap back open.  
  
Fingers, curling into his cheek, not quite like a caress, but sharp little nails that press into his skin.  
  
And then, a soft voice speaks to him.  
_  
_ _“Hello, John.”_  


It takes him by so much surprise that he flails away, detangling himself from the sheets that came off the bed with him and scrambling over to his closed bedroom door. He presses his back to it and stares, wide-eyed at the shadow that pulls itself into a standing position.  
  
Against the dimly-lit room, it is a stain of ink shaped as a boy.

 

He doesn’t know how he finds it in him to speak, but the words come tumbling out, breathless and fast.  
  
“Areyouaghost?”  
  
The figure cocks its head to the side curiously, and John can see an outline of curls on top of its head sway with the movement.  
  
“Do you _think_ I’m a ghost?” it asks, and it takes a step closer. There is no sound on the floorboards, but John can see, plain as day, the shape of his shoes. John has never seen a ghost like this before, (but he’s never seen a real-life ghost, either) but he doesn’t think this is what a ghost should look like. His eyes dart to the space under the bed that it crawled out of, briefly.  
  
[ “Are you a monster?”](http://meetingyourmaker.tumblr.com/post/157189504798/in-the-bedroom-at-night-monsters-dont-exist) he whispers, eyes widening, and to his surprise, the figure laughs.  
  
The laugh is loud and clear and seems to echo through his head, and John is sure mummy will hear it. He puts his finger in front of his lips, shushing him, because if this _is_ a monster, it still needs to be quiet. The shadow’s eyes brighten.  
  
“Monsters don’t exist, John, and if they did, _I_ wouldn’t be one of them.”  
  
There’s a sudden gleam of white teeth and John thinks it’s smiling.  
  
“Oh,” he says. “What… what are you?”  
  
“I’m Sherlock,” the figure says simply, and it steps closer to him again, causing John to push his back further against the wooden door.

 

Curiously, the figure sighs, as if bored. “You know me, John. Don’t be _rude_ .”  
  
“What’s a Sherlock?” John quickly asks. He’s never heard of something called a Shur-lock before.  
  
“Not _a_ Sherlock. That’s what you call me. That’s my name. Just like _your_ name is John Watson.”  
  
“How do you know that?” John whispers, amazed.  The figure steps closer still, and he’s suddenly right in front of John, leaning down towards him. There is a coldness that radiates from the black figure, but when it reaches out a hand this time, there are no sharp little nails pressing into his face, but a soft caress, like the way mummy used to do it. The hand curls into his cheek.

  
“I know all sorts of things about you,” Sherlock says. And then, without taking a breath, he says,  “I know your father is dead and your sister still wets the bed almost every night, but she cleans it up before anyone sees, and your mummy puts alcohol in her drinks every day. I know that you have bad dreams at night because you were there when it happened. I know you don’t go to your tutor, even though you have one because your marks are slipping, but nobody knows about that yet.  I know that you’re all alone.”  
  
John thinks that if Sherlock were a real person, he would have given him a hard kick to the shin, but his eyes quickly dart past him towards the bed, where he had just been sleeping. There is no indication that any of that could be true, but rather than be frightened or upset, he thinks maybe he’s impressed.  
  
“Wow,” he whispers. “That’s so _cool!_ ”  
  
Sherlock cocks his head to the side, and something very curious happens, indeed.  
  
Where once an all-black figure stood, a mere shadow that had leapt off of a person and had wandered into John’s bedroom by mistake, was starting to change.  
  
The figure’s hand began to fill and lighten, the black of him peeling back, up his palm and up his wrist, revealing the pale skin of someone who looked very much like a person indeed. John’s eyes widen as he watches, and he looks quickly up at Sherlock’s eyes, just in time to see the all-white shape begins to fill with two small, dark circles and the color of mountain tops.  
  
“Are you a mind reader?” John asks, genuinely curious. Sherlock laughs again, and his smile is sharp and bright. He shakes his head, and John notices individual curls and waves where he didn’t before.  
  
“No,” Sherlock says, and his hand drops away from John’s face. “I’m just me. I’m your friend.”  
  
_Friend._  
  
And all of a sudden, the realization hits him. _The boy from the train!_ His _pretend_ friend!

 

Only… he doesn’t look so pretend anymore. _  
_  
“Wow,” John whispers, leaning forward. “How are you here? How come I can suddenly see you? How come… but how come you can talk now?”

  
“Does it matter?” Sherlock asks. “You can see _me_ and I can see _you_ . Isn’t that all that _really_ matters?”  
  
John considers this for a moment before deciding that, yes, it is. After all, if mummy or Harry saw Sherlock then they might make him go away, and John is deciding quickly that he doesn’t want Sherlock to go away. Not when he--Sherlock, what a strange name that is!--is actually, for-really-real here, _actually_ talking to him. John isn't just _imagining_ it, but he’s _hearing_ him, like it were a real boy in his room. His real _friend._

 

John’s heart races at the thought, and a warmth passes through him.  
  
“Come up off the ground now, John,” Sherlock says, and he holds out a small hand for him to take. John stands up and reaches for it, and to his surprise, they meet, rather than their hands slipping right through each other’s like he thought it might. It’s like touching a real-life person and everything, only... colder. When John takes his hand back again, it tingles.  
  
He watches as Sherlock crawls up to the top of his bed and sits there, waiting, but John is still staring at him in growing wonder.  
  
From outside his door, John hears the faint sound of another door opening and a pair of slippered feet shuffling out of a room and down the hall. There’s the familiar sound of the hall light switch flipping on and the light spills in from the crack under his door. The steps are clumsy and slow.  
  
He goes rigid, feeling the hair on his neck rise and a feeling of dread that mummy will somehow know he’s not asleep, that’s she’ll come in here and _know_ .  


That she’ll start screaming again.

  
He doesn’t move, in fear of making a sound, so he stays completely still, staring at the spot beside his hand, where he can see her shadow from under the crack of her door. It’s swaying, strangely, back and forth, back and forth.  
  
“She’s been drinking that funny-smelling drink,” Sherlock says calmly. “She’s going to be up all night.”  
  
He hears the sound of the heat kicking on and bursting through the vents and the steps outside his door turn around and walk back to their room.  
  
Only once he hears her bedroom door shut does John let out a breath.  
  
“That was a close one,” he whispers, and he walks over to his bed and climbs onto it. He sits, cross-legged, across from Sherlock.  
  
“How come I can only see half of you?” John wants to know. He points a finger at the left side of Sherlock’s face, which is still dark, compared to the other parts of him that are still slowly filling in with pale-looking skin. “It’s all… dark. Like a shadow.”  
  
“Don’t ask silly questions,” Sherlock says. “There are more fun things we could be talking about.”  
  
“There are?” John asks, blinking. “Like what?”  
  
John always made up what they talked about, before, so the fact that Sherlock has ideas all his own makes John feel suddenly very excited.  
  
“Well,” Sherlock begins, and then he launches into a mouthful of words that makes almost no sense to John at all, but he stares and stares at him, all the while wondering that if this _is_ a strange, strange dream, he doesn’t ever want to wake up.

  


***

  


The best part is that nothing really changes after that. John still goes through his days at school pretending he’s got a best friend that he talks to and plays with. The fact that his best friend is really there now only means he hasn’t felt the ache in his chest he tried to pretend wasn’t still there before.

 

He doesn’t question anything. Sherlock blends into his life as easily and naturally as if he had always been there. He’s strange and fascinating and otherworldly with his dark shadows and bright eyes, but he’s more human than any of the boys or girls he sees. They become like smears of muted color compared to the inky black shape of Sherlock’s wicked little grin.

 

John realizes quickly that having a best friend that nobody can see is better than having no friends at all, and it’s even better than having a whole bunch of friends at school that he can share his lunches with. Sherlock is better than anyone he has ever been friends with before because Sherlock is smart and funny and _doesn’t_ eat his lunch.

 

Sometimes he stares at John when he’s eating and John thinks he looks hungry, too, but Sherlock will grin and say he’s never hungry for food.

 

***

  
After lunch one day, Sherlock takes his hand and tells them it’s time to go and do something else, like play on the swingset, even though they’re not allowed outside when it’s not recess time.  
  
“It’s okay John,” Sherlock says, holding his hand even tighter. “Nobody will know we’re out there. It’s boring in that class anyway and your teacher is stupid. I know everything she does.”  
  
John giggles, even though he knows that calling someone stupid is bad, but his giggles fade away when Sherlock walks over to the door that leads outside. He looks around at all the other kids, but nobody sees the shadow-boy, and John feels even less noticeable in comparison.  
  
“Okay, John, let’s go.”  
  
“But what if we get in trouble?”  
  
“You won’t get into trouble.”  
  
“But what if someone sees us?”  
  
“Nobody is going to see you.”  
  
John ponders this for a moment, worrying at his lower lip, but Sherlock is smiling at him with little sharp teeth, eyes all lit up with the sort of mischief that makes John want to do the same, and his cool hand squeezes John’s tightly. John closes his fingers over Sherlock’s and reaches for the door, pushing it open, and Sherlock bolts out, pulling John with him until they’re both running.

 

***

 

At nights, John can hear the sound of music playing in his head.

 

He doesn’t know the song, or where it comes from. It floats in and out of his mind whenever Sherlock lays next to him at night, clutching his hand. On nights like this, it’s not cold, but warm against his own, like holding his palm over a little candle, and he feels Sherlock squeeze it and the music in his head gets louder. The soft strings of a violin help to drown out the sound of another wine glass breaking from downstairs.  
  
The times it doesn’t, John presses his hand to his ear and squeezes his eyes shut, and Sherlock will place a hand over his, and the music gets louder.

 

***

 

“John’s teacher called me again today.”  
  
“I can’t listen to this right now. I’m late for work.”  
  
“Well I think you need to. They found him outside again. _Again,_ Em. That’s the _third time_ this week, and do you know what he said when they asked him what he was doing out of class?”  
  
“I said _I’m not listening to this,_ I have to _go.”_

 

“He accused his teacher of having an affair. An _affair,_ Em. He said to her, ‘Sherlock says you’re having an affair.’”

 

“What? What’s that? That word.”

 

“How would he even know this?”

 

“That can’t be right. John doesn’t know what that is.”

 

“Of course he doesn’t know what that is. I’m asking you _why did he say it?_ Was it the accident? Did he hit his head _that_ hard?”

 

***

 

Sherlock doesn’t like Aunt Sophia.  
  
She’s the reason why John has to be home-schooled for a while now, “just until the end of this term” she assures John, who is decidedly _unhappy_ because being home-schooled means being stuck in the house all day with her and her red smile and no-nonsense attitude.

 

John watches as Sherlock stalks around the kitchen like a cat, circling their kitchen table, and John can’t seem to take his eyes off of him, even though Aunt Sophia is telling him something, pointing a finger at him.

 

Sherlock stops in his lazy step, directly behind her, and turns a bored expression on John.  
  
“She’s only _really_ doing this because she can get more money this way, and your mummy is too stupid or too drunk to not believe her.”  
  
John giggles a little at that. Sherlock looks pleased, and Aunt Sophia smacks her hand on the kitchen table and says, “are you even _listening_ to me?!”

 

*** **  
  
**

“John, who are you talking to?”  
  
“Sherlock.”  
  
“Who?”  
  
“Sherlock. My friend.”  
  
“What friend?”  
  
“My _friend_ , mummy.”  
  
“This again. Come down to dinner.”  
  
“No.”  
  
_“No?”_  
  
“Sherlock says not to come downstairs because he says that you’ve been putting alc-alcohol in your drink again, even though you told Aunt Sophia that you threw it all away. And he says that your hands are shaking because you’re already drunk and that you haven’t finished cutting up the chicken yet and he doesn’t want me to be around you when you’re holding something so sharp. And he says that the food won’t taste good because you haven’t been shopping in a long, long time because you don’t like taking the car to the store or anywhere actually because of daddy. Mummy, what does ‘drunk’ mean?”

 

***

 

John goes to bed that night holding a hand to his stinging, tear-streaked cheek, and Sherlock’s icy hand against it helps to ease the pain.

 

***

“Mummy isn’t feeling good today,” Harry says, when John passes by her closed bedroom door on their way out the door the next morning. “She was getting sick _all night.”_

 

***  


John doesn’t always know what Sherlock means when he says that John is like a beacon of light, but he likes the way it makes him feel.

 

No matter what seems to be going on in John’s life, he loves the way Sherlock makes him feel.

 

***

 

It happens one day when John and Sherlock are playing in the park.  
  
John is sitting on the swings by himself, only he’s not really by himself at all because Sherlock is standing beside him, and they’re staring at a dead bird on the ground.  
  
John has never seen a dead bird before. It’s laying on its back with its little orange feet sticking up in the air.  Its eyes are squeezed shut and there are so many ants crawling all over its little green body that it makes John think it’s covered in a blanket.  
  
“How come it died, do you think?” John asked. Sherlock was kneeling down beside it and poking it with his finger, and John made a face when he saw it pierce right inside and wiggle around a few times.

  
“Poison, probably,” Sherlock decides, pulling out his finger and taking a few feathers with him. “I wish it had smacked into a car, instead. Then I could see the inside of its brain.”  
  
Sherlock pauses, looking like he’s thinking for a moment, and John can see the way his expression slowly changes to one of excitement. Sharp little teeth in a dark cave.  
  
“Don’t smash his head!” John quickly says, and Sherlock looks very bored by that indeed.  
  
“It’s already dead, it can’t feel it,” Sherlock reasons. “Don’t you want to see what a brain looks like?”  
  
John considers this for a moment.  
  
“We should bury it instead.”  
  
Sherlock huffs and scoops up the bird with both hands.  
  
“We’ll keep it in your room, right under your bed. Then we can see what a bird looks like when it’s decomposing.”  
  
John thinks about that word. Thinks about falling apart.  
  
John is about to protest, tell him that mummy and Aunt Sophia _definitely_ won’t let him keep a dead bird, and _how are they supposed to sneak it in anyway?,_ when he hears a set of footsteps approaching.  
  
Sherlock is the one to look up first, but the round little boy that approaches them looks only at John.  
  
“Hullo,” he says, and he’s holding an two ice lollies. He’s sucking on one, coating his lips in red, and the other, still wrapped up, he holds out for John. “I’m Mike.”  
  
John blinks at the boy named Mike, who is a little pudgy and is wearing glasses, but is smiling at him shyly.  
  
“Hullo,” John says back slowly, unused to being approached by other little boys. “My name is John.”  
  
“Do you want one?” Mike asks, holding out the second ice lolly again. “My mummy bought me two and she said said--she said I should come and share with you. Also, she said--well, I was wondering, do you want to play with me?”  
  
“With _me?_ ” John asks, putting his hand on his chest. John doesn’t remember the last time anyone came up to him and asked him to play, and the feeling sends a thrill through his chest and a warmth down to his stomach so powerful that he nearly starts giggling from the excitement of it.

 

He grins, widely, and he reaches out to take the ice lolly from Mike.  
  
From the corner of his eye, he sees that Sherlock has gone still, but John is busy unwrapping it, (getting the blue colour, his _favorite_ ) when Mike says, “do you want to go play on the jungle gym?”  
  
He follows Mike’s pointed finger and he nods, standing up from the swing.  
  
“Oh,” he says suddenly, and he looks sideways at Sherlock, who is still standing there, unnaturally still, eyes narrowed.  
  
“Sherlock, do you want to come play?”  
  
“Who are you talking to?”  
  
John looks back at Mike, whose head is cocked to the side, looking at John with a curious expression. He looks at the spot that John spoke to before taking a big bite of his frozen snack.

 

It’s not all the time that John forgets nobody can see Sherlock. But it’s easy to when John can see him, clear as he can see Mike, right in the middle of day.  
  
“Oh, um,” John starts to say. “Nobody.”  


And then John is running, chasing after Mike as they race towards the jungle gym, which isn’t very hard because Mike isn’t a very fast runner, and when John beats him to it, he turns around and smiles brightly.  
  
Sherlock does not run with them, and when John looks over Mike’s shoulder, he sees that Sherlock is still standing there, in the exact same spot, staring at them, but his expression makes the grin fade from his face.  
  
Sherlock isn’t smiling like he was just a few minutes earlier, but he’s staring at John with an unreadable expression.  
  
John has the sudden memory of mummy and the jacket and the way time had seemed to freeze.

  
But then Mike is catching up to him, breathing hard, and he says, “wow, you’re _fast!”_ and John looks away from Sherlock because Mike then says, “okay, first one to the top wins!”  
  
And John laughs and nods and puts his ice lolly between his lips and puts his hands on the silver bars so he can start pulling himself up, up, up to the top, (thinks of flying up to Heaven) and he wins again because Mike is slow and huffing the whole way.

  
But he grins at John like he’s impressed, and it makes John feel all the more excited.

  
From up at the top of the jungle gym, the two of them sit, and John can see a woman sitting on a bench a little ways away. She’s got a round face, like his new friend Mike, and she smiles brightly at her son and her son’s new friend John.  
  
“We just moved here,” Mike says, and a bit of red juice is dripping down his chin and onto the front of his shirt.

 

“Me too!” John says excitedly, because he's never met _anyone_ he's had so much in common with before.

 

Mike tells him about his pet iguana named Frankenstein and John tells him he likes to play pirates, but he doesn't mention that when he plays, it’s with his best friend Sherlock that nobody can see.

 

He doesn't mention Sherlock at all, in fact. Doesn't even think about him, right up until the moment he does.

 

Mike has the idea that he should ask his mummy if John can come over and spend the night, and John hasn't felt so thrilled by something in probably forever.

 

But when Mike stands up and turns around, wobbly, carefully easing himself down the bars, there is a sudden flurry of movement and any trace of smile on John’s face vanishes.

 

John looks up, just in time to see Mike flying off the edge, falling off the side of the jungle gym, falling, falling all the way down to the ground and landing with a sickening thud and a _pop_ in the yellow grass.

 

And from where Mike had been standing just moment before, was Sherlock.

 

Clutching a smashed bird between one completely black little fist.  
  
John is frozen, staring wide-eyed at Sherlock, whose eyes are narrowed into slits at the spot where Mike is lying.  
  
Every trace of him that John had grown to know had vanished; no longer is he the little boy from the train with his mountain top-colored eyed and pale cheeks.  
  
His eyes have gone all-white. His arms, his face, his clothes, every bit of him gone _black,_ every bit the ink-stain of a boy that John saw clawing its way out from under his bed.  
  
And John has never been so afraid as when he saw the little green bird in Sherlock’s hand being crushed and mangled, right in his palm, bits of brown and red oozing from its body and dripping onto the steel bars.  
  
The air seems to go very still in that moment, and the only thing John can hear is his own thumping heart right in his ears as Sherlock turns his angry-eyed glare right at him.  
  
“You’re _mine_ ,” Sherlock growls, and it makes the hair on the back of John’s neck rise. _“_ You’re _my_ friend and you’re not going to play with him because I _said so_.”

  
John is in too much shock to reply, to say much of anything, but he doesn’t have to, because from down on the ground, Mike is crying out in pain, and then just crying, loudly, so loudly that the lady on the bench hears and comes running over.  
  
From up on the bars, John looks down at the two of them, his ice lolly melting in his hand, sticky juice dripping down his fingers and all the way down to the ground below.  
  
Mike is crying harder, now that his mummy is here, and he’s cradling his wrist in his hand. John feels himself go cold when he sees that it’s already begun to swell.  
  
“Mike! Mike, what happened?” she’s shouting.

  
“H-He pushed me,” Mike says, in-between sobs, and he sounds every bit as confused as John feels. His glasses had fallen off his face and were lying, cracked, a few inches away.  
  
_“What?”_  
  
Mrs. Stamford looks up at John, pulling her son close to her chest, but John can do little more than look back, helplessly.  
  
“I didn’t--  
  
_“What is the matter with you?!”_ _  
_ _  
_ John feels hot tears prickling in his eyes and desperation rolling through his stomach. “I didn’t! It wasn’t me!”  
  
_“John?”_

  
And suddenly, mummy is running over to where she could hear all the commotion, and John hasn’t seen her look worried like this in forever, and it’s worth it, it’s _almost_ worth it to see her alarmed gaze look between the crying boy and his mother to her son, sitting atop a throne and feeling anything but kingly.  
  
“John, what’s going on? What happened?”  
  
“Your son pushed mine off! His arm might be broken!”  
  
_“What?”_  
  
“Mummy, I didn’t, it was--it was Sherlock--”  
  
And then the look vanished, and mummy’s face becomes dark and angered, and she puts her hand on her face, completely at a loss as to which situation needs handling first.  
  
“I’m--I’m sorry, he’s not normally like this,” he hears her say. “I don’t know what’s gotten into--”  
  
“I don’t care what’s gotten into him,” the woman shrieks. “If my son’s arm is broken, you’re paying for it!”  
  
The two go back and forth, back and forth, yelling over Mike’s screaming, which seems to get louder and louder by the second.  
  
And John stares down at the whole thing, feeling colder and colder by the minute, and it has nothing to do with the fact that Sherlock comes to sit down right next to him and takes John’s hand.  
  
John looks down at the inky-blankness that’s a stark contrast to his pale skin.  
  
“It’s okay, John,” he says in a softer voice than moments before. “It’s just a sprain. He probably won’t even remember this.”

  


***

 

After that, everything is different.

 

After that, everything seems not quite right.  
  
Mummy is even more distant than usual, even though John has tried telling her time and time again that he didn’t do it, that it wasn’t his fault. That it really _was_ Sherlock who did it, and Sherlock never even looks upset when John does so. He just stands there, grinning like the Cheshire Cat with his hands behind his back.  
  
“Stop it, John,” she says through gritted teeth and white fists. “Enough. _Enough.”_ _  
_ _  
_ In a desperate attempt to make things better, to fix everything, he tries to change tactics. He tells her that it was an accident. That he was playing pirates with Mike and that he was the captain and Mike was his first mate and when he told him to be on the lookout for fellow pirates, Mike had stepped too close to the edge of the jungle gym and fallen off and it was an accident, mummy, and it _wasn’t his fault!_ _  
_ _  
_ “Say, ‘I didn’t meant to do it’.” Sherlock coaches him in his ear. “John, say: ‘I would never hurt anyone.’ That will make her listen.”  
  
“I didn’t mean to do it,” John pleads, tears prickling his eyes. “I would never hurt _anyone!”_ _  
_ _  
_ A bill comes in their mailbox a week later.

 

***

 

Sherlock never address what happened that day. Whenever John tries, the subject is abruptly changed.  
  
John will say, “Sherlock, why did you do that?” or, “He was nice and he got really hurt, and everyone is mad at me!”  
  
And Sherlock will say innocently, “Why did I do what?” or, “don’t be silly, John. _I’m_ not mad at you.”

 

And then he will give John a look and tilt his head to the side, showing a row of white, sharp-looking teeth. And that means it’s time to talk about something else.

 

***

 

It all comes to a head one morning, when John is sitting outside on the tire swing.  
  
“She’s watching you,” Sherlock says, and he’s sitting on the grass beside him, digging his finger into the ground, and when John looks later, there won’t be a hole there at all. “Your mum, she’s watching you from the kitchen window. She’s wondering why you’re always talking to yourself, but don’t worry. She’s drinking again, so she probably won’t remember this later.”  
  
Sherlock digs his finger in deeper.

 

When John had asked him what he was doing, he told him that he was trying to find a worm so that he could lure a bird down from the tree, so he could _finally_ see what the inside of one looked like.  
  
The last time he had the chance, he adds in a clipped voice, it had gotten _ruined_ .  
  
“Are you going to hurt it?” John asks, and the panic in his voice is clear. “Sherlock, don’t hurt it!”  
  
“I’m not going to hurt anything,” Sherlock says, and his voice is edged with exasperation. “It’s already _dying._ I can tell.”

  
John has no idea how Sherlock could know such a thing, doesn’t know how he knows anything at all, and the weight of that reality seems to crush him in confusion.  
  
“Please don’t hurt it.”  
  
And quite without warning, he feels tears prickling his eyes, because it’s too much, it’s suddenly _all too much_ , and John is confused and doesn’t understand anything at all, and the thought occurs to him that what if this _really is_ all his fault?

He’s never missed daddy as much as he does right now.  
  
From the corner of his eye, he sees Sherlock standing up and walking a few feet away.  
  
“Please, Sherlock,” he pleads. “Please don’t.”  
  
“Are you afraid of me?” Sherlock asks suddenly, and he whirls around on John so fast that he actually startles. He’s looking at John like it’s the most important thing in the world that he answer honestly, and it’s the honesty of it that makes John bring his hands together, fiddling his fingers together nervously.  
  
“No,” he says, and Sherlock takes a step closer, leaning in so close that John can feel ice radiating off of him.  
  
“Answer me, John. Don’t lie.”  
  
“ _Yes,”_ he says quietly. “Sometimes. Sometimes you do bad things and I get in trouble and what if I can’t--what if I can’t make any friends because you’re mean to them?”  
  
There is a long pause in which Sherlock does nothing but stare at him. It’s the longest moment of his life and immediately, John regrets having said it at all. Sherlock is so silent, so still, that John almost reaches out to touch him, just to make him _stop_ but the moment he moves his hand, Sherlock snaps to life.

 

“It doesn't matter,” Sherlock says sharply, and John has never seen this before.

 

Strands of black, like static, rise from Sherlock’s dark shoulders.

  
And John thinks, _decomposing._

 

“It doesn't matter because you're mine and nobody else is going to ever get to have you, _ever.”_ _  
_ _  
_ And before John can say another word, Sherlock is gone; vanishes in the blink of an eye, like he were never there at all. The only trace of him left are the words floating in the air like dust, surrounding him, fazing into his skin and sinking down into his body like it were making a home right in his very soul.

 

***

 

Time feels different, after that.

 

No longer is it measured in birthdays and Christmases or new school terms, but in how often John spends his time waiting for Sherlock to come back.

 

“Where’s your little friend?” Aunt Sophia asks weeks later, on a rainy Sunday before Church. Mummy isn’t joining them, hasn’t gone since before daddy, but is upstairs, asleep, and Harry is tugging off her shoes and pulling at the edge of her dress.

 

They don’t see the way John’s stands very still by the front door or the way his eyes gloss over as he stares at the way his aunt primps and preens at herself. Making herself pretty for the Lord.

  
“He wasn’t real,” he hears himself say, and the words feel wrong, even now. “He went away.”

 

“ _Finally_ ,” Harry murmurs, and John feels a heavy weight in his chest and imagines that the tie he wears is a hand, reaching up to his throat and suffocating him. He wanks to yank at it, but he can’t find the energy. Aunt Sophia nods in approval as she reaches into her purse to pull out a case of bright-red lipstick.  
  
“That’s wonderful, John,” she says, leaning towards the mirror and puckering up her lips. “I was beginning to wonder if you were _ever_ going to let that silly thing go. Your mother will be happy to hear that.”

 

She turns a bright smile towards him, but it vanishes immediately.  
  
“John, _how_ many times do I have to tell you not to undo your tie?”  
  
“I didn’t,” he says automatically, eyebrows furrowing, and Aunt Sophia sighs with loud impatience, clicking her red claws on the wood surface. She kneels in front of him and puts both her hands on the two sides of his black tie and yanks them together.  
  
“Next time you do this, you’re getting a spanking.”  
  
She yanks his tie up to his chin so hard that John sucks in a breath and takes a step back, and the feeling of a cold hand presses right into his back.  
  
The dark corner he stands in threatens to swallow him up, and as he stands there, watching Harry and Aunt Sophia putting on their jackets and shoes, it takes everything he can not to turn around and look.

 

***

 

It’s impossible to understand what it all meant.

 

Because John is still a little boy, up until that point he’s not, and it never gets easier to understand, even months and years later.

 

Days pass and mummy drinks her funny smelling drinks and Harry ignores him and Aunt Sophia makes them say grace and everything is quite the same as it was before the day on the tube.  
  
And John is, all at once, alone again.  


***

 

More or  less.

 

***

 

The thing about having an imaginary friend, John knows, is that they’re eventually forgotten.

 

According to every single book ever written on the subject, of which there aren’t many, but John is sure he’s found every one, a child having a pretend playmate is one of the most common experiences of growing up. A form of self-soothing, the researchers say. Creating and sustaining an imaginary friendship is a ‘sophisticated cognitive skill’, they say. It’s a routine part of development, they say, and it is absolutely _no_ cause of concern.

 

To the parents, they always assure the same thing:

 

Imaginary companions usually disappear by the time the child goes off to school, or when having one is no longer socially acceptable.

 

“Kids can separate what’s real life and what’s fantasy,” reads the final paragraph of a psychology textbook that John finds tucked away at the local library. “At the end of the day, they know it’s all pretend play and nothing more.”  
  
John wants to will the words off the page; want to make them come to life and wrap around him like a shield, reassuring him of him of his own quiet fears.

 

Because psychology doesn’t lie. All those therapists with their clever experiments and tests. They know none of it’s real. They would tell John he was, at best, experiencing some form of childhood trauma and at worst some sort of paranoid schizophrenic.  
  
They would say there was no other explanation for the creeping sensation he feels when he walks into a room, or the way he can’t quite sleep at night, knowing that the far corner of his room never gets light enough, no matter what time of day, no matter what new house he lives at.

  
There would certainly be no explaining the creeping shadow that stalks his peripherals or the phantom feel of a hand passing over his head at night.  
  
And a voice, deeper, and more masculine than he ever remembers it before that whispers in his ear.

 

_I’m here, I’ve been waiting for so long._

 

***

 

Sarah is the most beautiful girl that John has ever seen, ever.  
  
Meeting pretty girls is not the sole reason he started playing rugby for his school’s team, but at sixteen, he can’t deny that it’s not a giant, wonderful, glorious, _beautiful_ perk.  
  
His team is laughing and smacking each other on the backs as they run off the field, hollering taunts in the air to the poor sods on the other side. John yanks off his helmet and pushes a hand through his sweaty hair as he jogs over to the bench to grab his bottle of water, and it’s there that he sees the gorgeous redhead standing with a group of girls a little ways away, and she’s smiling right at him.  
  
John recognizes her from chemistry lab, and it’s the reason that he knows her name is Sarah Sawyer and that she can balance equations better than anyone else in class, even if it’s only half the reason why he likes her. The other half is because of the way she always tucks her red hair behind her ears before she smiles prettily.  
  
She catches John’s eye when he uncaps his bottle to drink from, and when she smiles and tucks her hair, John feels himself grinning.  
  
He takes his time gathering his gear together, stalling purposefully. He keeps his eye on Sarah and her group of friends, and when he sees that most of them are starting to make their way towards the exit and Sarah gives him one more look, John springs into action.

 

"Enjoy the game?" he began as he made his way over. "I don't think I've seen you come to one before."

 

Sarah folds her hands behind her and lifts her shoulder in a shrug. "What can I say? I had a sudden urge to show my school spirit."

 

She makes a little fist and swings it through the air in front of her at 'school spirit', and she laughs a little awkwardly. John can see the way she immediately regrets doing it.

 

"Is that the only reason?" he wants to know, and Sarah grins wider.

 

"What else could it be, hm? You think I like watching a bunch of sweaty boys running around in a great big circle?"

 

"Yes," John says, very, very seriously. "Yes, that's _exactly_ what I think."

 

His grin breaks through and soon they're both giggling, and her laugh makes something in John's stomach feel warm. He's never had a girlfriend before. He's never had a girl _interested_ in him before, but he at least knows what it looks like when one is, and it’s a little bit like this.

 

"I suppose you and your mates are all going out for a big celebration, then," she says, after just a moment of silence.

  
"Ah, well, yes," John says, and he moves his helmet from one hand to the other. "But I'd most certainly not go if something better came along. Know of anything?"

 

Sarah's grin continues to grow and she tucks another strand of her hair behind her ear.

 

"I'm sure we could think of something."

 

John tilts his head to the side in the direction of the school, an invitation to follow, and Sarah nods and starts walking with him. “I think we could.”

 

***

 

They only go on one date before John decides he’s going to ask her to the school’s formal.  
  
She says yes, and John wasn’t so worried about that part. She likes him, he can tell she does from the way she seeks him out in the halls or the way she suddenly starts appearing at his rugby matches, sometimes with friends and sometimes by herself. John thinks he must like her too, because he always seems to be noticing.  
  
The thing that John is worried about is the fact that Sherlock--no, no, he doesn’t call him that anymore, just the thing in the corner of his eye-- hasn’t appeared in over a week.  
  
Not worried. Worried is a strong word and Sherlock is nothing but a figment in his head. He doesn’t appear on his own. He comes and he goes because John thinks him. All those conversations, all those late-nights of imagining the way he sits next to John while he sleeps, running a hand through his hair. Those don’t exist. They can’t. They never did.  
  
It’s easy to tell himself that. He doesn’t feel so crazy that way.  
  
He rents a suit, but it’s Harry that helps him to tie his tie up better than he could ever hope to do on his own.  
  
Usually it’s a boy’s father who stood in front of their sons, explaining in patient voices how to fold the fabric and which parts cross over which to create the look of a perfect gentleman, but dad doesn’t exist in this world anymore. John can barely even remembers what he looks like unless he looks at a photograph, of which there is only one that hangs on the wall.  
  
At six o’clock on the Friday of the formal, he descends the steps, all done up with his hair combed to the side, but not after trying three other styles first and worrying over which way Sarah might like best.  
  
Harry makes a little gasp when she looked up at him from the couch, lowering her magazine to her lap. She tells him he looks handsome. She tells him she looks just like dad.  
  
This gets their mother’s attention, who is walking in from the kitchen, and John feels himself standing up a little straighter in her presence. Feels himself nearly holding his breath.  
  
“What do you think, mum?” he asks.  


She looks at him, up and down, as if seeing for the first time how broad his shoulders have become. How tall he is, even though John is not very tall at all. John thinks she almost looks surprised, but when her gaze lifts to his face, her expression darkens. The dark circles under her eyes, the ones that have been there for years, suddenly seem darker. Her gaze become vacant and glossy and her mouth sets in a firm line that makes his smile fade.  
  
She looks like she’s in so much pain she might cry.

 

John counts backwards from ten in his head.  
  
“Mum, doesn’t he look good? _Just_ like those pictures of dad.”  
  
Harry’s voice breaks the moment. Their mother looks between them, at Harry’s beaming face and John’s weakening smile. The corner of her mouth lifts, but only just.  
  
“Very handsome, John. Your father would be proud.”  
  
She doesn’t ask to take any pictures.

 

***

 

Sarah looks even more beautiful than John remembers, even though he only just saw her in class earlier that day.

  
Her hair is plaited to the side, hanging over her shoulder prettily. She worries at the headband keeping it all in place, but John catches her hand on the fourth time it goes up to her head, and he gives it a quick squeeze.  


“You look fantastic,” he tells her, and her free hand ghosts across her ear when she smiles, but this time there is no hair for her to tuck away shyly. John finds it even more endearing that she tries anyway.  
  
“And _you_ ,” she says, leaning her shoulder into him. “Don’t look like a sweaty, dirty rugby player. Who’d have thought. I hope you dance better than one too.”  


John isn’t anything close to what one might call a practiced dancer, but he's always been fantastic at faking it, especially with a joke or two thrown in at his expense.

 

Sarah seems terribly charmed by the whole thing, and when he leads her out to the dance floor, John takes her by the hand and pulls her out to the center of the floor.

 

“Not right _here_ ,” she protests nervously. “I don’t want _everyone_ looking!’  
  
“You’ll be amazing,” John tells her sweetly. “You’re always amazing.”  
  
John can’t see the way that her cheeks go pink under the dim lights, but she winds her arms around his neck when John settles his on her slim waist. She fits nicely in his arms, like she belongs there, and he smiles down at her when they began to move in a circle, in time with the music.  
  
Dancing leads to even more dancing, and the dancing that starts slow and measured and charmingly innocent begins to shift when the music suddenly changes to something faster, something heavier. The dance floor is packed by this point, and every time John turns, he has to pull Sarah closer to avoid her getting lost in the crowd of people.  
  
It makes everything so terribly intimate, and when someone bumps him from behind, John feels Sarah’s soft body press right up against his own, feels the swell of her breast right against his chest, and he suddenly feels dizzy with the intimacy of it all.  
  
Or maybe he’s just dizzy because of all the turning, because Sarah is suddenly grabbing him by the shoulders and spinning with him in a tight little circle and she’s laughing and he’s laughing with her, and everything's a haze, a giant blur around them, every face distorted and nebulous, save for Sarah, right in front of him.  
  
Everything is perfect. Everything is normal. For a few moments, he feels just the same as everyone else.

 

And he feels happy.

 

Until suddenly a razor-sharp pinprick in the crowd snags his attention and makes him look up into the crowd.    
  
A familiar face. A clear face, clearer than John has ever seen someone look before, with razor-sharp edges and black, inky hair.  
  
His eyebrows furrow, but Sarah is pulling him in a circle again, making the figure vanish momentarily before John is whirling back around, eyes seeking out the same spot, and he feels something in his chest tighten and his stomach drop.  
  
Because in the crowd of people all dancing and swaying and grinding together, is Sherlock.  
  
Looking right at John.  
  
He’s standing completely still; statuesque, almost, compared to the frantic gyrating around him, but the thing that shocks John into almost-stillness is how completely and utter human he looks.  
  
Not a single trace of shadow. No bit of black obscuring his features. He looks every bit as real as the girl in his arms, but even she seems to fade into a blur of colors compared to the vibrancy of the not-so-little boy anymore.  
  
And it doesn’t matter that John hasn’t seen him as clearly as this since he was a child, because he knows him like he knows his own reflection. It threatens to take the breath right from his lungs, and he can’t seem to stop and stare long enough before Sarah is pulling him around again.  
  
And when John’s head whips around to find the same spot, Sherlock is standing closer.

 

She pulls John’s body tighter against his own and John blinks. Sherlock is walking.  
  
He doesn’t push through the crowd, but his surroundings adapt and morph to his will. People dance away at just the right moment, boys twirling their girls away from the empty space beside them, as if they can, on some level, feel what it is that John is seeing.  
  
If what he’s seeing makes any sense at all.  
  
Sherlock is dressed in a black blazer, opened in the front, revealing a sliver of pale skin under a white shirt. A single black curl falls in a tightly-cropped wave right against his forehead.

 

His eyes, a piercing stare.

  
And he looks nervous.

 

John has never seen this look on Sherlock’s face before. Or, he's never _imagined_ it, but now is certainly not the time or the place, so John squeezes his eyes shut, shakes his head a little as if it will make the image vanish from his mind, but when he opens his eyes again, Sherlock is stalking even closer than before, eyes locked directly on him.  
  
In the span of just a few moments, it feels as if time itself has slowed to a crawl. He no longer hears the music or sees the swirl of colors around him, or even feel Sarah in his arms, because Sherlock--a very real Sherlock-- is pinning him in place with his stare.  
  
Distantly, he knows that Sarah is tugging on his arm to get his attention, but Sherlock is drawing closer and closer and John doesn’t know what it is that’s going to happen or what Sherlock is doing here or why, or, more accurately, why John is seeing him now of all times, when he hadn’t for so long.  
  
Sherlock looks more real than John ever remembers him looking before, and it makes him slow to a stand still.  
  
And he takes a step in his direction.

  
Sherlock doesn’t look surprised by John’s sudden movement, but he comes to a stop, as if waiting for him to take more steps. He cocks his head to the side curiously and the curl sways to the side.  


John has never felt more like a moth in all his life, but if this is anything like the magnetic pull to the flame, then John feels an urge in his very bones to walk into his own death.

 

Music fades. He hears nothing but his own heartbeat in his ears.

  
He watches as Sherlock extends his hand out to John, palm facing upwards. Beckoning and inviting.

 

Asking.  
  
“John! Where are you going?”  
  
Sarah’s voice breaks through to him and everything unmutes.  
  
“Sorry?”  
  
He looks down at Sarah, at her pretty, but confused face. She looks between him and the spot he had been staring.  
  
“Did you want to go sit down? You don’t seem too interested in dancing all of a sudden.”  
  
She suddenly looks very self-conscious indeed and starts fiddling with one of her earrings.  
  
“Or we could go have something to eat? They’ve got a chocolate fountain.”  
  
John, for at least ten seconds, doesn’t understand what she means by that. The word doesn’t make any sense to him, because all he can see when he looks down at her dilated pupils is Sherlock’s willowy silhouette, holding out a hand and asking him to _come_.

  
Come. Come where?

  
“Sure,” he says, finding his voice at last. He attempts a smile. “Yeah, sure, why don’t you… go and get us a spot?”  


Sarah puts her hand on his arm and squeezes, concerned. “You okay?”  
  
John looks back up, right past the top of her head, and Sherlock is still there, but his hand has lowered, and John watches something like hurt spread across his face, the briefest glimpse of it, as he turns his back on John and begins to fade through the crowd like a ghost.  


Desperation, sudden and fierce, pulses through him. A longing, somewhere deep inside, is clawing its way to the surface, and for once, it’s not a desire to prove that it’s not real, that none of it can be real, but a need to prove it is.  
  
Because Sherlock can’t go away again, and that’s the first time he’s thought that in years.

  
“I’ll be right back,” John tells Sarah, and before she can say anything else, he is stepping around her and pushing his way through the crowd, following the barest glimpses of Sherlock’s back as he wades through the sea of people who do nothing to hint they even remotely notice him. To John, he’s so clear, so perfectly realistic that he can even make out the creases in his jacket, but no matter how quickly he walks, he _can’t seem to reach him._  
  
It doesn’t take long for John to lose him. Sherlock vanishes before he can clear the crowd and he’s left standing in the middle of the dance floor, looking about wildly, but given John’s _atrocious_ lack of height, he’s forced to continue his straight path until he reaches the very edge of floor. He comes out near the double doors,where he sees a couple snogging in the corner. He does not see Sherlock.  
  
John feels something tighten in his chest once more, wondering why, wondering _how_ , if it was all in his head, if it was always in his head, but it couldn’t have been because he swore, he _swore_ he was just right _there_ .  
  
All the energy and motion John had just moments ago feels wasted.  
  
And suddenly, he’s not quite in the mood for dancing. Or any of this.  
  
He won’t leave Sarah alone by herself too long, because that wouldn’t be on, but he’s feeling a bit lightheaded and heavy-hearted, and deciding he needs to take a break from the heat of the room, he goes through the double doors to step out into the parking lot.  
  
The doors close behind him with a hard bang. He’s not actually sure if they lock from this side or not, but he leans his back against it and tips his head back until it rests against the cold door. He can hear the faint chords of the music changing, something slow and soft now, and he imagines that Sarah is looking for him in that moment.

 

He closes his eyes. Wonders how much longer he can go on not knowing if he’s crazy or not. Eight years later and he still sees him. Different, now. Older-looking, now, but the same.  
  
When he opens his eyes again, his heart leaps up to his throat.

 

Sherlock is standing in front of him.

  
Sherlock says nothing, which is both strange for him and not. He used to talk, non-stop, rambling on and on, saying things that John neither understood nor kept up with, which was always fine because John loved listening to him _whatever_ he said, but now he is silent.

 

Like the shadow that John would see in the corner of his eye.  
  
At last, Sherlock moves. He takes slow, measured steps towards John. His shoes echo on the pavement, and John takes a step closer to meet him halfway, halfway to something, but he doesn’t know what.

 

He doesn’t have to wait long, because Sherlock is reaching out and putting both hands on either side of John’s face. Warm hands. Hands that never felt this warm before, almost hot. Up close, John can see details he never knew existed before. A crease in his skin. The full shape of his mouth.  
  
And John knows what’s coming, even though he doesn’t how _how_ he knows or why it will. It’s the look on Sherlock’s face, the way he’s caressing John’s.

It horrifies him, yet something is rooting him to the spot.

 

He’s never done it before, even though he thought he was going to try it for the first time tonight, with Sarah. It was going to be on the dance floor, right when she was looking up into his eyes, right when the music was swelling to that perfect crescendo, because that’s the romantic thing to do, and it was going to be the best first kiss he’s ever had.  
  
But the image vanishes in his mind like a ripple in the water, because Sherlock is leaning down and pressing their lips together.  
  
_Maybe this doesn’t count_ , is the only thing that John’s shocked-mind can conjure.

  
It doesn’t count because it _can’t_ count, because none of this is real.  
  
It cannot be real.  
  
But it feels real. Sherlock’s lips are full are warm and firm against his own. The hands on the sides of his face are real, because John can feel them curling into his cheeks, a little tighter than he remembered it used to. He feels nails digging into his skin, and for the first time in eight years, he thinks, _decomposing._

 

He wonders if he’s been doing it this whole time, and Sherlock being here now is the tether keeping him together.

 

John doesn’t do much. He doesn’t know what it means. His heart's still racing, but he can neither move nor act. Doesn’t know what he’d do if he could. All he can focus on is the way suddenly cold lips feel against his own, and when Sherlock pulls away, John is met with icy eyes and a smirk.  
  
_“Hello again, John. Have you missed me?”_

 

***

 

It’s not that John didn’t miss him.

 

He just didn’t know how much.

 

Like picking up a book from years earlier and finding a bookmark still in its place, Sherlock fits right back in John’s life like not a single moment has passed. His slinky silhouette follows John wherever he goes, talking out loud, talking about everything and anything, though nobody can hear him but John.  
  
He tells John that the girl they pass on the sidewalk is sleeping with her stepfather. He points out John’s classmate on the bus with the different colored socks and says he’s failing biology. John cocks his head to the side and stares, wondering how such a thing could be so obvious, but _it’s clear as day,_ Sherlock always whispers right in his ear. _Just look. Don’t you see?_

 

John never sees, but he smiles and nods along with it anyway before looking away. Someone must have told him at some point. Obviously that’s how he knows.

  
He tries to never look too long. It never goes well when they catch him, sitting alone, staring at them so intently.

 

***  


John knows what it means when he hears the muffled sound of a bottle falling on the ground at night. He knows what it means when he hears it rolling against cold, slanted floors and tapping against his side of the wall. He know what it means when he hears the exact same sound from the other side of his room, against his other wall.  
  
John doesn’t need Sherlock’s hand over his ear anymore to block out the sound, not like when he was a kid. But on the nights when trying to block out the sounds of crying or screaming doesn’t work, or when one of mum’s midnight visitors is just a little too loud, Sherlock appears.  


By this point, John has long given up trying to decide if any of this could be real or not, or if he’s just imagining it all in his head or if he really is some sort of crazy person who can still see the imaginary friend that he created eight years ago after looking at a little boy on the tube, or that now this is what he imagines the little boy would look like, so many years later.

 

It’s hard to force even himself to care anymore, when Sherlock will stand over his bed, an outline of a man with a wild mess of curls and iridescent eyes.  
  
_“Listen, John,”_ he says, and John will close his eyes, close out the sounds from beyond the walls as the faint melody of a strange and seductive song fills his head. _“This is the song I wrote just for you.”_

 

And it’s such a nice thought; a song, written just for him, that he can almost ignore the way that Sherlock’s eyes pierce straight through him or the way the paleness of his hand that reaches out to push his fringe from his eyes shrives to black.

 

***

 

John takes Sarah out on a proper date to make up for the dance. He tells her he was sorry, _so_ very sorry. Something came up. Something important, something urgent, and he had to leave right away.

  
It takes convincing, but Sarah is too sweet for her own good, and when John takes her hand and laces their fingers together, she agrees to let him take her out to make up for it.  
  
One date leads to two, and two to three, and by the fourth date, Sarah is over being mad, which is very good indeed, because her hands are tangled in his hair and her lips are pressed against his, and John has never, ever kissed a girl like this before and he’s hard as a rock in his trousers because Sarah’s tongue is in his mouth and it’s _fucking amazing._ _  
_ _  
_ John has his back to a tree with his legs spread, just enough room in-between for Sarah to stand. She's pressed up against him so close that there isn't a single inch between them, and just when Sarah hands starts to push between them, trailing lower and lower, making John’s breath hitch in his throat, he feels him.  
  
Eyes peeling open, he watches as Sherlock’s form, all black and slinky like a shadow, walk past.

 

Today is a day he looks like a shadow. He’s beginning to notice it happens.  
  
He circles the tree like a cat on the prowl, with his hands drawn together, and John has no idea what he’s doing, but Sherlock just keeps walking and walking, and John’s mouth has gone slack against Sarah’s.  
  
He tries to push the thought of him aside. Closes his eyes, because if he can’t see him, he can’t think about him, and all he wants to think about is Sarah’s lips and her hands and the way her hand curls and cups, making him moan into the warm cave of her mouth.

  
_“I would kiss you like that, if you let me,”_ a deep, masculine voice whispers in his ear, and John groans again. _“I know you better than anyone. I know what you like. Perhaps even more than you do.”_ _  
_  
The images flash before his eyes before John can stop them, and it doesn’t help that Sarah is still kissing him, which makes the vision of Sherlock, all long limbs and sharp angles, large, hot hands pressing against him, feel all the more real.  
  
He wants to shake his head. Wants to make Sherlock stop talking, wants to go back to thinking about Sarah, _just_ about Sarah, but when his eyes peel open again and he sees Sherlock standing right behind her, smiling at him, John feels himself going weak at the knees. He heard himself groan, and although Sherlock’s mouth isn't moving, John can hear him in his head. And he’s murmuring quiet things that makes him put his hands on Sarah’s hips to push her back, gently.  
  
He says, “I’m sorry. I think we should go.”  
  
He says, “I’ll call you.”  
  


Later that night when John is lying in bed, he wraps his hand around himself and strokes hard and fast, eyes squeezed shut, biting his lower lip, and he can’t even stop himself from thinking about what it would be like, what it would feel like, if it were possible or how crazy it makes him to think about it.  


And when he’s finished, he kicks the covers down his legs and breathes in deeply, fringe plastered to his brow because Sherlock’s hand on his forehead makes him feel like he’s burning up inside.

 

***

 

If John thought it was hard to maintain the balance of sweet, kind, semi-popular athlete and crumbling disaster in a pair of rugby pants before, Sherlock’s resurgence in his life makes it impossible.

 

But perhaps it’s because none of that shit mattered, and John only _realizes_ it doesn’t matter now that he has a better excuse to mentally withdraw from a drunk mother and a wayward sister and the haunting photographs on the walls of a man who looks an awful lot like he does.

 

From downstairs: _I hate you! I wish you had been the one to die, not dad._

 

Sherlock wraps long, never-ending arms around his shoulders as John passes a hand through his hair and wills himself not to punch a wall or maybe himself. Sherlock whispers things in his ear, comforting things, easing things, things that makes him laugh. He can feel what he imagines curls to feel like against his cheek.  
  
He hears the sound of a wood table scraping against tile floors and a glass tipping over. Something smashing. He feels a hand on his cheek, pressing nails into his skin.

 

 _“What must it be like in that funny little head of yours?”_ Sherlock will ask in a deep baritone. “You can’t keep your secrets from me. _What is it you want to do?”_

 

John used to pass so easily for normal.

 

***

 

Sarah is too sweet for her own good.

 

No matter how many times John says he’ll call her and never does, no matter how many times their dates are interrupted when they’re _just getting to that point_ , she always smiles and tucks her hair behind her ear when John finds her next.

 

“She’s an idiot,” Sherlock will deadpan from directly behind her and John has to force himself to pretend he doesn’t hear him. “She’s dull. You don’t actually care about her. Why are you trying?”

 

John will ignore him. He’ll say, “what do you say we go out tonight?”  
  
“What, so you can run off again?” she’ll ask with a raised eyebrow. She faces him and puts her hands on her hips. From behind her, Sherlock will mimic her, icy eyes gleaming mischievously. Sarah shifts weight. Sherlock does the same.

 

He gives the illusion of a puppet master pulling her strings, but it’s John that feels like he’s being yanked and pulled.

 

“Not this time,” he promises, and he means it. “Me and you. We’ll have a nice night.”

 

Sarah looks skeptical, but Sherlock suddenly drops the act and his face contorts to one of disgust.  
  
“Honestly, John. What a waste of everyone’s time. You know you don’t like her.”  
  
“I like you,” John says quickly, reaching out and taking her hand. Anything to shut Sherlock up, for just a minute. “I _want_ to spend time with you. Just you.”  
  
Sherlock goes still and Sarah smiles big, and John tries to ignore the way Sherlock’s icy glare seems to be burning a hole in the back of her head.

 

***

 

 _“Atropa Belladonna,_ ” Sherlock says from behind John, as he’s standing in front of his mirror, smoothing out the creases in his trousers. “ _Beautiful_ flowers, aren’t they? Perhaps Sarah will like them.”  
  
John closes his eyes, cricks his head to the side.  


_Deadly Nightshade_. He’d learned the term in his textbook, just that day.

 

“Warriors used to dip the ends of arrows and harpoons in its poison,” he continues smoothly, and John turns around to look at Sherlock, standing in the dark, dark corner. He seems to blend right in and John can almost swear the shadows are crawling off the walls and creeping up Sherlock’s body.  
  
“Imagine, John,” he says, eyes lighting up. “Something so beautiful being _so_ deadly. Isn’t that fascinating?”

 

And it should have been warning enough. It should have been enough to tip him off, the idiot that he was, letting himself forget about that day. A foreign sense of alarm rises in his chest, but before he can open his mouth, Sherlock is chuckling, deep and wolfish. “Don’t look so scared, John. _Belladonna_ can’t be found anywhere around here.”

  


***

 

A week later, when he has Sarah in the back seat of his and Harry’s shared, on-it’s-last-leg Ford, John’s hand cheekily up her shirt, Sarah’s chest arched against him, is when it happens.

 

It’s easy to ignore the shadow that circles the car, whistling and makes deductions out loud, steel and metal muffling the way he says, _really now, this is ridiculous. She’s not right for you. Don’t be an idiot, John. John. This is boring._ _  
_  
It’s the way he says his name that makes it so hard for him focus.

 

Sarah’s hands are running up and down his back, and even her whispered words right in his ear isn’t enough to block Sherlock’s taunting baits. He tries to block him out, tries not to pretend he’s not there, that the _only_ thing there is a beautiful girl beneath him, sighing and moaning under his lips.  
_  
_ _“She is pretty, though,”_ John hears Sherlock say, his deep voice penetrating even the car. “Like a little bird.”

 

John freezes. He feels every hair on his body stand straight up and a coldness pass over him.

 

A memory floods his mind. Crying. Bright red, sticky juice. A woman screaming at him. A cold glare.

 

He opens his eyes, sees the blur of Shadow passing by the backseat window. Something like panic rises in the back of his throat.

 

“Stop,” he hears himself murmur. _“Stop.”_  
  
“Huh?” Sarah wants to know. “What?”

 

 _“_ Music,” he murmurs, moving his mouth down to her neck in an effort to distract himself. He clenches his eyes shut and tries to block out the sudden, unanticipated sound of a bow dragging across a violin’s strings.  
  
“ _I thought I would play something romantic for you,”_ he can hear Sherlock’s voice in his head now, velvety and tranquil. “ _Do you like it? I thought about you when I wrote it.”_

 

The pull of strings is is delicate and crisp at first, pretty and sweet, and just when John thinks he can tune him out, refocus on the girl beneath him who is pushing her hand down the front of his trousers, the music abruptly changes to something akin to tires squealing and screeching on wet pavement.

 

It’s so loud and so sudden in his head that John actually startles, pulling himself up to his knees with a gasp, throwing a hand on his ear.  
  
“John?”  


“ _Christ_ , it’s so loud.”

Sarah looks alarmed and looks around the backseat. “ _What_ is?”

  
_“Maybe she doesn’t like it,”_ Sherlock taunts over the sound of the music, and John can see him, see his shadowed form from through the window, standing with his back turned to the car. John can see a pull of his elbow and the shape of something long and thin being pushed through the nighttime air. _“How rude. I wrote it especially for you two.”_

 

The sound of the violin grows so loud that John feels like the inside of his head has been hollowed out and replaced with a loudspeaker. The music is _angry_ , loud and frantic, and John has to pull away from Sarah altogether, covering both ears with his hands and squeezing his eyes shut.

 

The worst part is that he knows how he looks. He knows how crazy Sarah must be thinking he is, but the music is loud, is _so loud_ that his head begins to feel like it’s being split right open.

 

Sarah is trying to get his attention, he can feel her shaking him by his arm, but her touching him seems to make the music just get louder, _more_ angry, and John yanks away from her, knocking her hand off of him and barking out a _“stop!”_ but he has no idea who it’s meant for.

 

Sarah’s face is twisted in horror and confusion, and she frantically pulls her shirt down, but otherwise can’t seem to figure out if she’s supposed to remain still or touch him, stay in the car or get out and run.  
  
And the music continues to swell, reaching a furious crescendo, and when at last John opens his eyes again, hands turning white from the force of pressing them into his head, he sees Sherlock, an inky black outline in the night, standing right at the window.

 

And like a radio being turned off, the music stops.

 

In the dark, John can see his whited-out eyes glowing at him. Sharp, white teeth flashing at him.  
  
“John, I think--I think you need to take me home now,” Sarah says, when the moment of silence stretches unnaturally long.

 

“John? _John?”_

 

And John looks at her, really looks at her, as if hearing her for the first time.

 

He licks his lips. He ignores the way every hair on his body seems to stand up.

 

He says, “what?”  
  
“I think you should take me home,” His pause makes her look more upset. From outside the car, Sherlock’s shoulders are shaking. He’s laughing.

 

 _“I think that would be a wise idea, John,”_ his voice in John’s head says. _“It’s polite, isn’t it? Take the girl home. It wouldn’t do to keep her out late. Anything could happen.”_

 

Shakily, John agrees. He doesn’t know how to play off what just happened. He apologizes. He tells her, weakly, he’s prone to migraines.  
  
“Next time will be better,” he says as he pulls up to her house after a long, silent drive.  
  
Silent for Sarah, anyway.  
  
For John, a low, slow and soft melody. Apologetic.

 

“Again, I’m--sorry.”

 

Sarah, for the first time, says nothing. She doesn’t know what to say, John can read it in the stiffness of her shoulders and her nervous, side-eyes.  
  
Not even sweet, sweet Sarah Sawyer knows what to say to what just happened, so instead, she nods and reaches for the door handle. John reaches out and touches her arm.  
  
The soft music stops.

 

“I’ll see you tomorrow?”

 

The door closes behind her and John watches her walk quickly up her steps and through her front door.  
  
From the back seat, John hears Sherlock say in a confident voice.

 

“She doesn’t seem to be feeling well, does she? Perhaps she’ll stay home tomorrow.”

 

***

 

Sarah doesn’t come to school the next day. Or the next.  
  
Rumour has it that she’s come down with an awful flu that’s been keeping her in bed, _but her friends have been thinking about her,_ says her dad when John calls on the third day of no word.

 

“She’s been getting so many flowers,” he explains. “The purples ones are her favorite.”

 

***

 

“What’s up with Watson?”

 

“You’ve noticed it, too?”  
  
“He’s been weird for months, now. Never talks anymore.”

 

“He’s like a scared dog. Jumps out of his damn skin if you try talking to him. Doesn’t even show up to practice anymore.”  
  
“I wonder if it’s problems at home. He never looks like he gets enough sleep.”

 

“Dunno. Freaking me out, though. Saw him talking to himself the other day.”

 

“Poor guy. He must be so upset about that girl he was seeing.”

 

***

 

The army is an easy decision.

 

He finds a brochure on the table of a coffee house that he’s taken to disappearing to because he can’t stand being at home and he can’t stand being alone, and the low murmur of people around him and the squeal of the steamers quiets the thoughts in his mind. It allows him to feel normal. Average. He can smile at his barista in a way he can’t smile at anyone else and make it look convincing.

 

He can almost feel Sherlock’s withering look at the back of his head as he fingers the flayed edges of the pamphlet that reads, _A sense of belonging may sound like a small thing. Yet it fuels you as much as food and water, because it doesn't just feed your body, it feeds your mind and soul. Join today!_

 

“The _army?_ ” Sherlock says, peering over his shoulder. “Do you really think that’s such a good idea, John? Surely they don’t allow schizophrenics into the army.”

 

But John is not schizophrenic. He’s not. He _knows_ he’s not. Doesn’t think he is, anyway. Christ, he really hopes he’s not. Mum would have a fit.

 

But he needs something.

  


Later he learns that if he works hard enough, the army can help him be a surgeon within a decade. He’s always known he wanted to be a doctor, and a surgeon is even better.

 

He thinks maybe he can learn how to exercise the part of his brain that sees and hears an imaginary man coming and going in his life.  
  
Coming and staying seems to be more accurate, these days.  
  
When he goes home later that night to find his mother passed out on the couch with a bottle of vodka spilled on the carpet and their telly missing, and Sherlock’s words are no longer soothing, but scathing, he know what he has to do.

 

***

 

For a while, it works.  
  
For years, everything is almost blissful.

 

It’s easy, John thinks, to forget it all when he spends his days stitching wounds and doing drills. Long nights spent in desert hospitals and long days baking under an unforgiving sun, and all the in-between times traveling and shagging women on three different continents.  
  
John doesn’t know what it is that makes Sherlock go dormant some days and appear others, but for years he comes and goes. A silent, blackened shadow that he sees in the corner of his eye, a cool hand on the back of his neck under the sun. A whisper in the night that John thinks could be a dream, but always wakes up feeling more like a distant, far-off memory.  
  
It becomes so infrequent that years later, he’s almost forgotten altogether.  
  
And then one morning, when John is in the back seat of a humvee trading stories with Murray, an IED goes off that sends their truck hurtling through the air and John spiralling into the hot sand.  
  
The world spins on a dime and John can barely keep up with it. He doesn’t know which way is up or which is down, left or right, the only thing he’s aware of is the jarring, deafening sound of gunfire exploding in his ears.  
  
His hands reach for the gun strapped to his belt, and only when he finds his footing to stand does he whirl around, and manage to take aim at the enemy fire in the distance.  
  
But amidst the dust and the sand and the blinding light, amidst all the delirium, John can make out the inky-black shape of a man standing a few yards away.  
  
John doesn’t need to be up close to see the details to know he is tall and looming and has white eyes and sharp angles.  
  
Sherlock lifts his arms towards John, pantomiming taking aim.  
  
A singular blast of gunfire and John feels a bullet ripping through his shoulder.  
  
He’s heard stories of what it feels like to be shot, but he’s never heard of this part; the part where he can see the shadow man lowering his arms and smiling at him.

 

And then he falls.

 

He falls and he falls, and when his back hits the sand, he falls right through. The hot ground swallows him up, grains and pebbles invading him and spilling into his body like a sand-shaped hand curling its scorching fingers around him and pulling him all the way down into the bottom of the earth, then further down still.

 

***

 

He has no concept of time.  
  
He becomes aware of his surroundings eighteen days after the blowout at Registan, but for all he knows, it could have been eighteen months or eighteen years or eighteen seconds and it would have all felt the same.  
  
He floats in and out of consciousness for a few minutes, listening to a faint beeping beside his bed that he finally registers as a heart monitor, and the soft, infrequent steps somewhere beyond his small, private, sandy-colored room. His mind, slow and groggy, attempts to put together the pieces of where he is and what happened to get him here, but it feels like wading through quicksand, and nothing he puts together makes even a lick of sense.  
  
He can’t even quite say for sure if he’s alive.  
  
Visioned blurred, he finds the coordination to weakly lift a hand, but the slightest of movements makes him instantly cry out. A sharp, excruciating pain, like a thousand fires being set to his skin, blasts through his entire left arm, radiating down from his shoulder and making his entire arm snap rigid and tight.  
  
The sensation is like a lightening bolt in the temporal part of his brain, and memories of explosions and gunfire flood through him, a rapidfire flipbook of images filtering in behind his squeezed-shut eyes. The sensation in his shoulder becomes so overwhelming that he turns his head to the side and immediately begins to retch, but all that his stomach can muster is a bit of bile that dribbles pitifully onto his pillow.  
  
Morphine. He needs morphine, God help him, he had never been in so much pain in his life.  
  
Trembling, covered in sweat, he turns his head back right again and focuses on his breathing in a vain attempt to block out the pain.  
  
“Nuse,” he attempts to call out, but his voice is so hoarse, so weak, that it barely registers as a breath, and the effort takes so much out of him that he has to drop his head back to the thin, flimsy pillow and squeeze his eyes shut with a whimper. “Nuse--”  
  
_Please, God,_ he thinks, fighting through the agony. _Let me live. Please make this pain stop._  
  
_“As you wish.”_  
  
His eyes snap open, despite the fact that the voice doesn’t come from anywhere in the room, but he hears it inside his own head, completely unlike a thought, and more like the icy words had been breathed right into his mind.  
  
No… No, no, _no._  
  
_“I can make anything better if you let me.”_  
  
Feeling the hair on his neck rise, he feels him, before he sees him.  
  
But but he’s so afraid to look at the door, where, right in the corner, he knows he’s standing.  
  
“You’re in so much pain, John,” Sherlock says, and his voice is so soft, but does nothing to stop the rising terror he feels. “My dear, John. What _have_ they done to you?”  
  
John’s head jerks, eyes finding the corner of the room, but in the split second it takes, Sherlock is directly beside his bed, looming over him, and John inhales sharply.  
  
Today, he is all Sherlock, with his mountaintop eyes and sharp edges, but when one cold hand reaches out and strokes John’s cheek, it’s shrouded in black shadow.  
  
“My dear, wonderful John,” he says in a deep, soothing voice, and long forgotten are the days that he fell into an easy bliss at the words. “You’ve fought so hard and look where it got you?”  
  
“No--”  
  
Shaking, John tries to sit up, tried to call out for a nurse, for anyone, but a shadowed hand comes and rests on his chest, pushing him down to the bed, and John, so weak and tired, can’t even begin to stop it happening.  
  
“It’s alright, John,” Sherlock puurs. “It’s all going to be alright. I’ll take care of you. I always take care of you.”  
  
The words float over his mind and settle there, shrouding him in any icy blanket.  
  
He feels his eyes growing heavy and Sherlock’s smiling face, with creeping blackness taking him over, is the last thing he sees.

 

***

 

It takes him nine hours and eighteen minutes to fly from the Kabul to London, and the whole way, his discharge papers are clutched in one hand, crinkled and torn at the edges with creases forming every which way and fresh ink already smudging from the hard press of his thumbs. He memorized the first line after just one glance, which started with the hateful, _On Behalf of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers, we hereby grant John H. Watson…_  
  
He never makes it past that part before he folds the paper in half, then in half again, and then once more for good measure, until the little square of horridness can fit into the palm of his hand like a grenade about to blow him up from the inside.  
  
It feels not so good. _  
_ _  
_ He hasn’t let go of it since it was handed off to him by a soldier fifteen-years his junior, whose voice shook with nerves when he announced himself in John’s hospital room. He knew why the boy was there the moment he appeared, expected it even, but he let him go through all the motions anyway.  
  
Sherlock was stood behind him the entire time, peering over the boy’s shoulder like a puppeteer, observing him, but for once, John didn’t get the sense he were pulling the strings.  
  
Merely watching how they worked.

 

***

 

Six months later, he sees a flyer on a lamp post on his way home; plain, white paper with a stock-image of a tree stamped at the bottom, its bony branches attempting to reach up the page, but cut off in a hard line in whatever unfortunate editing tool had been used.  
  
It reads: _Fighting Your Demons One Monster at a Time._  
  
It sounds a little redundant, but the words catch his attention.  
  
It tells him to meet at seven o’clock sharp on Tuesday evening at the community center, biscuits and tea to be served, _show up with your mind and heart open._  
  
As it turns out, the biscuits are stale and the tea is lukewarm, but John takes a seat at the edge of the circle, right next to a woman who is already clutching a handkerchief and dabbing her eyes with it, and the bloody thing hasn’t even started yet.  
  
He doesn’t know what he’s really doing here.  
  
The meeting is run by a woman by the name of Ella, who looks up and smiles warmly at John when he had finally found it in himself to stop loitering outside the door and make the plunge.  
  
She allows a five minute grace-period, in which John and eight other people sit in uncomfortable chairs in a circle and stare awkwardly at anything but each other. Then she begins.  
  
She starts off by introducing herself and what she does, before explaining that this is a _safe place_ \--a phrase that makes him openly cringe--for them to openly communicate their troubles and fears.  
  
Which she calls ‘monsters’.

 

As they go around the room introducing themselves, John becomes aware that his knee is moving up and down. He’s only half-listening to everyone else, barely catching their names and what _monster_ it is that has brought them there today, and why today, and why not sooner and why, why, _why_ .  
  
He must be nervous, he thinks, because when the man next to him--Jared? Jeremy?--goes quiet and the rest of the room’s mournful gazes turns on him, he almost forgets what it is he’s supposed to do.  
  
When the moment becomes unbearably awkward, he begins.

  
“Hello,” he says. “I’m John. John Watson. And I’m here because…”  
  
He pauses, remembering how he pulled the tab off the flyer and stuffed it into his pocket, glancing around subtly to be sure nobody saw.  
  
Why is he here? Why _did_ he come? What did he expect out of this?  
  
“I’m a veteran of--”  
  
Kandahar. Afghanistan. _I was shot_ , he thinks. _I died. I think I died. Did I die? Am I dead now? Is this heaven or is this hell? The tea is shit, must be hell. Christ, I think this room is actually hell._ _  
_  
“I was shot. In the shoulder.” He fingers the cane resting between his legs. “Six months ago.”  
  
The pause is as long and even more painfully awkward than the first. Jared-slash-Jeremy coughs and it’s so hateful that John tightens his grip on the handle.  
  
“You’re learning to adapt to civilian life,” Ella prompts helpfully. “Is that right?”  
  
Yes, that sounds right, John thinks. But, he also thinks, no, it sounds very, very wrong.  
  
“Yes, well, I’m--was--a surgeon.”  
  
_“Oh for God’s sake, John, this is pathetic. You know that’s not why you’re here.”_  
  
John is so used to the voice by now that he doesn’t jump when it echos from outside the door, but he feels a familiar sheet of ice creeping up his insides, slowly freezing one organ at a time, heart-first. It’s always his heart first.  
  
Not now, something in his mind screams. _Not now._  
  
He runs his tongue over his lower lip and wills the sound to stop. “I’m--”  
  
The step of a ghostly heel clicks down the hallway, a lazy but precise pace.  
  
“I was shot, and I’m--yeah. Civilian life. All that.”

 

 _“No no no, John,”_ baits the deep, masculine voice, and steps are growing closer. John’s eyes close and he cricks his neck. He taps the cane on the floor, hard.  
  
“It started when--”

 

 _“Nope.”_  
  
A click. The sound of a rusty, metal door. He watches it open, screeching on its hinges, and the echo of footsteps drawing into the room.  
  
Nobody turns around. Nobody looks.  
  
Ella clears her throat. She discreetly glances up at the rest of the room.  
  
But John’s heart is beating so loudly in his ears that he doesn’t notice his own laboured breathing until a hand reaches out and touches his shoulder.  
  
Nobody sees the dark shadow in the room and the way he begins to walk along the edge of the wall. Nobody hears the loud click of his heel in his lazy step. They just see the man with the cane in the chair and the way his eyes seem to dart past their concerned and alarmed faces at something that all these years later can’t possibly exist.  
  
Sherlock pauses in his lazy saunter.  
  
_“Come now, John, don’t be dull. Tell them about me.”_

 

***

 

In a hasty attempt at getting away from the meeting, and the people, and the feeling of walls closing in on him, he collides with someone on the street.  
  
Or rather, it’s John that’s moving so fast, who is looking over his shoulder and not paying attention to where he’s walking, that he runs right into the violinist.  
  
He just barely manages an apology, immediately walking around the tall man with the long coat, who is bending down to pick up the dropped bow.

 

And John is already walking away, too fast to hear the man ask, “Afghanistan or Iraq?”

  


***

 

As things seem to go, months pass with relative silence.

 

John moves into a little flat in London that he can just barely afford. It’s not much, but he has a bed and a telly and a computer with a faulty charger, but it’s enough because the only thing he uses it for is to blog, because Ella had told them all at the meeting that they should keep one, even though nothing happens to him, ever.  
  
Nothing that he wants written down for anyone to find, anyway.

 

He sees women, but they never make it past three dates before he breaks it off. It’s always _him_ that breaks it off, and that’s very important.

 

At night, he takes a shot of whiskey and something for the pain in his leg. He hobbles over to his bed and eases himself down, staring at the dark corner of his room until he falls asleep, and every night that he doesn’t dream he counts as a win.

 

***

 

The worst part of all of it, is that John isn’t any happier this way.

 

Those nights he doesn’t feel the dip of his mattress or hear the ghostly whisper in his ear, or feel the long fingers spidering their way up the back of his neck at night, curling and cupping and holding him, doesn’t make him feel any better or any safer. It feels like the heaviness that surrounded him has vanished, leaving him feeling so light that he wonders if he’s going to float away, and it scares him more than feeling chained to the earth.  
  
What he does notice, however, is a tremor in his hand that he can’t seem to stop.

 

***

  


He sees a little boy in the park one day. He’s sitting by himself, picking at the weeds in the ground. He’s gazing at a group of children playing, not far off, and John can see the want in his eyes.  
  
It makes him ache, down to his very core.

 

***

 

And then he remembers.

 

***

 

He meets her one rainy afternoon on the sidewalk.  
  
She has blond hair that curls gently above her shoulders and a pair of the prettiest blue eyes John has ever seen. There’s a hint of mischief to them, just the right amount when she tells him, “no, no, I should have been watching where I was walking. Christ, I’m just a big clod, aren’t I? Look at you, you’re soaked!”  
  
John kneels down to pick up the styrofoam cup that has the last few drops of coffee clinging to it. The name _Mary_ is scrawled on the side. He grimaces and apologizes for her loss as he tosses it into a nearby bin for her, but she only waves a hand and reaches into her pocket to pull out a few napkins that she holds out for him. John catches a glimpse of a nurse's ID tag.

  
“It’s probably a sign,” she admits. “I’ve been trying to get off caffeine for ages.”  
  
“Well, _Mary,_ clearly I’m your walking conscious,” John tells her with a small smile as he attempts to dab the front of his jeans, which he quickly realizes does absolutely nothing to mop up the wet stain. She laughs a little helplessly and shrugs.  
  
“I feel bloody awful. Are you doing anything now? Can I buy you a cup that you can actually drink, not wear?”  
  
The question catches John off-guard and he looks up at her pleasantly smiling face and stares.  
  
Against the backdrop of London’s gloomy greys, she stands out strikingly, like something that doesn’t quite belong. A beautiful, perfect hologram of red and yellow and blue. She’s radiating and vibrant.

  
Her hair is bright and her eyes are bright and her red coat is salient and unforgiving, but her smile is soft and John feels a warmth blooming in his chest that he hasn’t felt since--  
  
John thinks maybe he’s a little bit in love already.  
  
He finds himself grinning and looking away. He coughs, then rubs his hands together shyly.  
  
“Ah--” he begins, then laughs. “Sure. Yeah, ah, coffee. That’d be nice.”  
  
It occurs to him that it is entirely possible that she doesn’t mean to ask him _to_ coffee, but is only making up for spilling hers, but the way she tucks her hair behind her ears and laughs again makes him think maybe, just maybe, not.  
  
“Do you want to--” she asks, using her thumb to point in the direction that she had been coming from. “I know a really good place one block over. I wasn’t going anywhere at the moment.”  
  
John’s never been asked out so quickly before. Never since spinning Sarah Sawyer around the dance floor has he ever remembered feeling so genuinely chuffed by a woman’s charm, and he actually smiles a genuine smile that makes the corners of his mouth crack from disuse.  
  
“Brilliant. Sure.”  
  
But he’s only able to manage a single step before the feeling blooming in his chest halts and freezes, and he can practically feel the color draining from his face.  
  
“I didn’t catch your name, by the way,” she’s prompting, smiling at him.  
  
From directly behind this beautiful woman with the bright blue eyes, blond hair and red coat, there is a darkness forming.  
  
After a lifetime of this, John knows it’s not a trick of the eyes, but he wants. He _wants_ , so desperate, because if it isn’t--  
  
If it _is-_  
  
He feels his heart start to race, race, _race_ , so fast, and he thinks of running towards the jungle gym and spinning on a dance floor and he’s positive he’s about to have a heart attack.

But the dread that suddenly fills him is only matched by the blooming relief in the pit of his stomach, and it’s the relief that makes him then feel dread all over again.

  
The shadow morphs and forms from nothing, and materializes into a shape that John knows so well.  
  
Sharp angles the color of matte where a face should be. An inky mop of black hair. A commanding, pulsating aura.  
  
And two, white eyes, the color of the tops of mountains opening.  
  
For just a moment, he stares at Sherlock.

 

_Decomposing._

  
A wide, white smile flashes, and John is suddenly looking between two smiling faces, feeling like the very ground beneath his feet is about to give way, any moment.  
  
And in horror, he watches as Sherlock’s hand, perfectly defined with his long, thin fingers, comes up and rests on this woman’s shoulder.  
  
“You okay?” the woman asks, laughing only a little bit awkwardly. “You look a bit sick."  
  
  
  
John doesn’t answer. Or maybe he can’t. Sherlock is still smiling at him and the woman is gorgeous and perfect in every way that John can know, but he takes a step away from her, and then another, before he’s turning and walking back the direction he came, leaving the beautiful woman to stare after him.  
  
He closes his eyes and tries his hardest not to hear the sound of the familiar footsteps trailing lazily behind.


End file.
